The Luminaries Lens On What's Actually Changing

In a world drowning in synthetic content, algorithmic noise, and shiny new tech tools, what actually still matters? This episode digs into the tension between where business is racing toward and what it can't afford to leave behind: real human connection.

I sit down with three powerhouse leaders Lou Paskalis, CEO, AJL Advisory, Kirk McDonald, CEO, Sundial Media and Lana McGilvray, CEO, Purpose Worldwide, who are each navigating that tension from very different angles. You'll hear why one executive believes we're entering an era where trusted curation will separate the winners from the noise, why another thinks everything marketers have learned might actually be working against them in the age of AI, and how a longtime entrepreneur is channeling her career into a humanitarian mission that's about to take her inside the Vatican with 40 teenagers from war-torn countries.

This episode goes places you won't expect. From the death of the traditional marketing funnel to the economics threatening global journalism, from the power of revealing your authentic self in business to why chasing curiosity across three career chapters might be the best professional advice you've never heard. There's a thread running through all of it: trust is the new currency, authenticity isn't optional anymore, and the people who understand that are building what comes next.

Whether you're a seasoned executive rethinking your playbook or someone early in your career trying to figure out which signals to follow, this one's going to hit different. Tune in, and then tell us which guest you'd grab coffee with.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hey, it's Jeannie. Welcome back to Lift Up Journeys, the show where we go behind the titles and into the real stories of how the world's smartest people got to where they are today. Today's a special edition. I sit down with some of the smartest executives and leaders I know, and I ask them where marketing and business are headed and what they're seeing right now that everyone else might be missing. I also ask them to share some advice, advice they wish someone they knew had given them on the way up. Here we are, the error method in motion. Let's get started. All right. I'm here with Kirk McDonald. Kirk, thanks so much for coming on LipTalk.

SPEAKER_04 0:45

Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 0:47

You are a busy man, not just personally, with all of the content that you've been creating and the conversations here at Possible, but also just as a business icon. Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_04 1:00

That's uh that's that's Wait.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Do you have to be dead to be an icon? No, okay. Well, let's just make you uh I'm still hustling. You're still hustling. You're still hustling.

SPEAKER_04 1:10

This is uh it's uh and one of the best hustles in the world. At the end of the day, uh we're very fortunate in this industry to do what we do. Think of all the different things that are happening in the world right now, um, and to really think about how people make connections with content, connections with each other. Um excited to be down here at Possible. So much of our industry uses these uh saying to today to someone, it's almost this calendar sync, right? It's the one place you know everyone's gonna be. Yeah um so this along with the other events that we go to every year, and I'm excited to be here and just fortunate chat with you.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. But you know, I I think everybody that watches and listens to our show probably wants to understand why you've decided to make the moves that you made, why going from Group M to Sundial, why the partnership that you just announced.

SPEAKER_04 1:56

You know, I would blame it on drinking, except most people know I don't drink. Um so that's not gonna fly. Um I feel fortunate that my all of my career decisions were driven by curiosity. Um I think the whole thing was this fascination with content consumers and the connections they made. So at every stage of my career, you're gonna hear me probably, if I had an opportunity to say something, talk about um uh the type of content, uh the the uh the platformer technology and the kind of and the quality of the connections made. Right. Um so that caused me to uh be into the print industry when print magazines were how you decided what kids school do your kids go to, or what was the fashion trend to wear, um, even as we are days before Devil Wear's Prada um uh two uh comes out. Um, there was this power of this editorial voice that said, Look, let me tell you the way, let me tell you the future, and and people followed. And then brand said, Let's ride along. But my whole career was kind of continuing to follow that. And as print evolved into digital, or digital sort of came along and revolutionized the connection point, that became an early thing to jump into. Then how to make it more efficient and effective. Programmatic pulled, and I went the programmatic path. And um, and I think one of the places I hadn't done was because I'd done the sell side and the technology underpinnings, I'd never done the buy side. So this opportunity, um, leaving AT ⁇ T and uh and the Xander and uh and and Warner Media when we had built that up, um the pandemic was there, and I became fascinated with really learning what the buy side looked like, and that was a great run. I really enjoyed my time at WPP, uh, primarily because um it as a scaled environment to be able to influence so many buyers to think differently about the space, um their role as educator, evangelist, um, but also sort of shaping the future is a very powerful platform, and I enjoyed doing that. Um I think it's led me to this. So I'm still curious about connections, human connections. And when Rich Lou Dennis and I got to know each other, uh he has a passion for human connections. And he said this is less than a media company, it is a human connections platform. It's a company built around uh experiential connections, content connections, and then community connections. And then um, how can we take all of these assets and really give a value proposition to brands so brands can be authentically connected? And it's the authentic, the authenticity of that connection, and now trusted connection that I think is what's driving me. And I kind of think given the emergence of so much synthetic content, the emergence of of uh so many choices for a consumer, um the role of curation, trusted curation, and trusted human connections are gonna matter. Um we still see it at our experiences, like the Essence Festival Culture coming out. Um uh and we see it more than just who's on main stage, but the things that happen as the community gets together and all of the common programs. Um, and then we see it, you know, when we do something like Black Women in Hollywood recently or or what we do a lookbook for for R29. So that's it. I keep being sort of chasing my curiosity. Yeah. That's the whole thing.

SPEAKER_01 5:17

Yeah, well, you know, it's it's fascinating that you use authenticity, that you use trust. I mean, everything that I've done in my career has been focused around what I call air. Yeah authenticity, inspiration, and relatability.

SPEAKER_02 5:28

Can I borrow that?

SPEAKER_01 5:32

Uh well, you know, we'll we'll trade because you're doing this interview for a while, but then I'll come knocking on your door. But but um no, it's it's it's so true because you can't be successful unless you have all three together. And everything that you're talking about, I think makes so much sense for being authentic and you are an inspiration. And I think everything that you're doing with your events, with your initiatives pulls in that relatability to, you know, like-minded groups that you can connect with, that you can relate to, and that all creates trust. Trust creates belief, and then there you are, then you've got a business that that comes out of it. But do you feel, because I I've heard a lot around the event, that people feel that AI is creating a resurgence of humanity.

SPEAKER_04 6:19

Yes. Um, so I'm excited if that's what's gonna happen. And I do think again, um uh technology that really is going to process information faster, rely heavily on patent recognition to kind of um automate the parts of this that require just memory. And if you can actually now move your resources to the authenticity of connections, I think that's a huge opportunity. So for us, we get very excited about it. So I'm in a year where um I do think our brands, Refinery29, Essence, um, AfroCon, BeautyCon, um, our unbothered products, um, uh all have this ability to convene people around values, convene them around their interests, um, convene them to content and services, but then uh create these new opportunities for brands. And and I do think that the role AI plays there is to power them. So at the center of everything we do going forward is this idea. And it's one of the reasons that we got partnered up with Audience Path, one of the reasons that we are partnered up with another company called Culture Hot. Um we have what we call the SMART platform. It's Sundial's marketing automation research technology platform, smart. Right. Um, it is made smart by a hundred years of creating content for women, 56 years of essence, uh, 20 plus years of refinery, 200 on across portfolio. Um lot of that content created even before they were digitized. Right. So we've got footage, we've got audience surveys, all of those things come to life to really give us a perspective of her dialogue for um the codes of her communication with each other um in ways that you you don't get it and it's not found and the large language models have not captured it. Now, if we can actually use that to power um insights that we share with brands, the um way we program and build uh relationships with talent and creators, uh the way we program our stages, uh both for entertainment or for content programming, even our content itself. So our editors have a development platform that they use internally powered by Smart, which co-writes, co-develops ideas for them so that they can then write on top of that. So think of it as data that informs their instincts. Yeah. So uh that feels to me like let's use the technology not to replace ourselves, not to replace our real value, but move our value to the authenticity of it, the human part of it. Um again, we're a human connections platform, so you'll hear that resonant and all of the things we do. But we do think we're in a moment where that is going to matter more. Um, and this role of curation to sort of cut through the noise, uh, to filter out all of the distraction so that we can actually spend more time doing this. I think that matters a lot.

SPEAKER_01 9:10

I well, I think it's fantastic to be able to see people wanting to get together. I mean, we all survived COVID where for a few minutes we took a deep breath and a break because we didn't have to rush to meetings anymore. And then we got panicked because there were no meetings, and then we kind of got used to it. And I I want to say a little lazy from my perspective, but now to see people really getting back out and and doing networking, conversations, communications that really build that that level of trust that you can't just get through content means so much.

SPEAKER_04 9:39

And nothing replaces it. I mean, at the end of the day, nothing really replaces it. I listen, I love a Zoom meeting or a Teams call. Um however, 7,500 people here for Possible say that human connections matter. Absolutely. And if they matter at the matter at the business level, then we'll let you remember it matters at the consumer level. Yeah. So um when we do the festival, we get, you know, uh north of 250,000 to 300 plus thousand people who find a reason to be in New Orleans for Fourth of July weekend. They come from all across the country, all across the world, actually. Um they fly in, they drive in all around this idea that I get to be at a place where I feel like I belong.

SPEAKER_01 10:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 10:18

Um, whatever generates that feeling. Um I get to now be there and I get to go and experience food and art and culture and music and entertainment. Um and I get to do it in a place where I think I share values and I share life experiences. That's a cultural moment. Um, the rarity of those, the substance of those, the uh the value of those should never be taken for granted. Um and uh we feel very proud that we're in a position to kind of one, do those for these communities, but then make sure that we bring along our partners into that conversation as well. Um the partnership with Culture Hive will introduce um a scoring mechanism to start scoring the quality of creative and culture, media strategy and culture, um, how brands show up in culture, um, the ability to work with audience path to extend this and to be able to uh to find those audiences um where they're really informed or gathered by their um the similarity of this of the of the uh semantic that has brought them there as opposed to a person-identifiable signature. So we're not gonna rely on that, but really rely on the context that has brought them together, are are all the things that we think really um uh lean towards what are are relevant and important to the future.

SPEAKER_01 11:37

Yeah, and how how exciting it must be to, in this relationship with audience path, to really get these signals that are real time and they're intent-based and they're focused on just honesty versus aggregated data that suggests something and you're trying to interpret results and take a guess.

SPEAKER_04 11:54

So you just nailed it, right? So um uh our behavior is a revealed honesty about ourselves that sometimes you can't capture if you only look at my statistics. Right. Because my statistics don't reveal as much as my behavior. Um, so it's very powerful signal. So again, uh for audience paths to allow us in this partnership, and we feel fortunate about it. Um so I was glad when this call came in and this thought was, well, what could they, what could we do? And it's more than around inventory extension. This really is about how do I actually actually scale like-mindedness, how do I scale interests and values um uh in a way that actually allows me now to bring to a brand a come more complete and robust solution. Yeah. So here's what it means to be at a place that we are, like Black Women in Hollywood. Here's how you brands show up in that space. But since we use our experiences as studios, we can't capture all of that content, but now let me distribute it to that like-minded audience. Yeah. Right, because they've shared, they revealed what makes them aligned. And now that I can create that um that extension with audience back and be able to score it, I now one of the things I think we've missed on was we did not prove and bring data to support the importance of cultural relevance. We've accepted it to be important. And when I said it on stage yesterday, every panel here will talk about it. Well, what's where where's the Nielsen score for cultural relevance? And in the absence of that, we felt it needed to exist as well. The combination of the two, I do think changes our conversations with brands in a very meaningful way. And and like I said, I'm very excited about that.

SPEAKER_01 13:29

Yeah, well, brands are absolutely looking for it too. I mean, I've been on the brand side, the agency side, I've been on all the different sides of the different businesses. And as a CMO at a big brand, you are always looking for where you can have the most impact with the audience that means the most to your business. And when you're looking at a sea of technology or data solutions, it becomes very muddled. So I think you're bringing clarity and opportunity and direction to a world that very much needs it.

SPEAKER_04 13:59

I I hope so. You know, at at AT, we launched uh the Relevance Conference. This is 2018. Yeah. It's a while ago. Um, so you'll see some themes in my whole career. That's being a career path conversation earlier. And it is the quality of connections and the relevance and the the sort of resonance in a connection. So uh yeah, I do think we're in this fortunate moment where again, if we get the right signals and we relay them properly, articulate them properly, uh, we can continue sort of what I think is this transformation moment we're all in, right? So we're dealing with a consumer that is more sophisticated than ever been before, right? So um, we're not fooling them with the content we produce.

SPEAKER_01 14:40

Right.

SPEAKER_04 14:41

They also know when the content is brand supported. Um from creators know. So uh if we really respect them and we want to actually meet them on their terms, then we need to actually um adopt their language, speak to them, not at them, speak with them so that they're part of the conversation. Um, I think this idea of just big distributed reach models is gonna be replaced by engaged participation models. Um so for brands who now sort of have to reflect on is it enough for me to buy cheap reach or do I need to buy trusted connections? Yeah. We want to show up as the pathway to trusted connections for brands.

SPEAKER_01 15:18

I love that. I love that. So last question. If you're gonna give a young, up-and-coming rock star business person three pieces of advice in their career, what are they gonna be?

SPEAKER_04 15:31

Um uh careers should be thought of, I think, in three stages, right? Uh be someplace where I'm learning more than I'm giving in the early parts of your career. Yeah. And and don't chase the money, chase the learning. So let your curiosity lead the first chapter. Um, at some point you'll actually be able to give more than you were getting. At that point, transition and become a manager and and give away everything you got.

SPEAKER_01 15:58

I love that.

SPEAKER_04 15:59

Completely give away all of it. And the reason you should give away all of it is it won't be relevant anyway. It's changing too quickly. Um uh and then I think you get in this third chapter, which I feel fortunate now I'm in, where what I'm looking to do now is is really get out of the way of those coming behind uh because uh I confidently believe they're smarter. But if I can guide a little bit on my way into whatever I'm doing now, um then I think that's fine. Um so to a younger person coming up or a version of me or whoever, chase that curiosity because if you're learning now, you're in a great spot. Um when you do feel like it's time for you to give, give knowing that you don't have the answer yet, but then give all of it. Just give and then um and then figure out the last one. I'm still in the figuring out of the thing.

SPEAKER_01 16:44

You're still well, yeah. Chapter three of work in progress. Work in progress. Thank you. Thank you so much for being on the show. Really appreciate it. All right, everybody. Stay tuned. Welcome back to Liftoff. I am so excited to have you here, Lou. It has been how many years since we've seen each other? A few.

SPEAKER_03 17:07

It's been a few, and I don't even think it was in this country.

SPEAKER_01 17:09

I don't I think you actually are right. But I see you every single day on social media, and and that makes such a difference because when you said you'd be on the show, I was really happy because you are a troublemaker, just like me, and you believe that the world could do so much better in so many areas, including you've spent a lot of your career talking about brand trust, brand measurement, brand safety, all the things that I love to talk about. And now you're focused on saving ad-supported journalism, which is awesome. So we've got a lot to talk about. So, first, thank you so much for being on the show because your presence here is celebrity-esque. The world has been following what you've been saying for a very long time now and focusing on just that commentary around trust. Talk a little bit about why trust in the media and marketing world matters, brands.

SPEAKER_03 18:05

Yeah, I think we're entering an interesting era, right? We've we've had this sort of slow roll bur um um war on truth. And now truth is fungible. People use alternative facts, people are wondering who to trust. Now you've got AI creators making things which may or may not be true. A rather random event occurred to me in December. I was on Bondi Beach for the first time in my life when the shooting started.

SPEAKER_01 18:34

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 18:34

Oh and while we were sheltering in place, people started passing videos on TikTok around which had fake content about the shooting.

SPEAKER_02 18:47

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 18:47

And it happened within 20 minutes, people were posting fake stuff. And so brands have established and had the opportunity to establish deeper levels of trust with consumers. If the message is from the brand, you know it's likely to be authentic. Right. So the brands that lean into that, that cultivate the relationship with consumers and give them sort of a beacon that you can trust me are going to really win in this next era.

SPEAKER_01 19:11

So and and I think that's so powerful because when you talk about brands that uh automatically now goes into social media. Social media crosses over into journalism and the lines become very blurry. And when you get into journalism, I I was just visiting my daughter who is in the Army, she's a lieutenant in Germany, and I was telling everybody how different the news was when you watch it outside of America than when you watch it inside the United States, because they talk about different content, they talk about different elements, and then you come back and you start to see journalism through a different lens. How do you think journalism's changed? And what do you think?

SPEAKER_03 19:48

Well, first I want to make a comment because my favorite news platform is DW News, which is the German public broadcasting system. It is in perfect English, and they go 10 minutes on a story instead of two minutes and 22 seconds, which you get here. So broadcast journalism internationally tends to go deeper. Their segments are more like a 60 minutes piece than something you might see on CNN. The real challenge right now are the economics, right? Um, I was talking to the CEO of a major news platform here in the United States, and he told me that right now they can afford to keep three news crews in the war zone. Uh uh at the time, one was in Tehran, one was in Erbil, which is 60 miles inside of the Iran-Iraq border, and another was hopping around the Gulf. They have a bureau in Tel Aviv. That leaves nobody to cover the war in Ukraine. And so we're now seeing that the big institutions are really struggling with the economics of reporting the news. At the same time, we see trust shifting from institutions to individuals. This is an interesting trend. It's driving the creator economy, it's driving a lot of uh news personalities to start their own podcast. Jib Acosta now has a bigger audience with his podcast than CNN has in any given average daily hour. So, how do marketers take advantage of that, as you well know, working with podcasters who've cultivated an audience and who have a trust-based relationship? That may be a more important uh avenue to reach marketers than the traditional advertising with the 60-second ad, you know, when when you do a live read for an advertiser, that has greater impact than pre-canned messing.

SPEAKER_01 21:32

Well, and especially the audiences don't even need to be that big anymore. They just need to be the right audiences. But do you think that journalism is turning into the Spotify of journalism where it's going to be all of these different newsmakers who have d established trust for various different reasons that people are just tuning into and start to follow down a path?

SPEAKER_03 21:52

Well, I think there is what you're talking about. We used to have a name for when I started in the industry. It was called media pointalism. And if you remember Surat, the Yeah. People would source their information a little bit from the New York Times, a little bit from CBS, a little bit from their local hometown paper, whatever it might be, and then they would form their own opinion. Right. And then we went into a period where I don't think that the average population has a lot of intellectual curiosity. Right. So they were looking for one sort of one size fits all news broadcast in the era of cable news. Well, now I think we're in a different era where, to your exact point, audience sizes are smaller, but they're more homogeneous. They have more shared interests. You tend to go into environment there's a dozen podcasts I listen to every week, including yours. And without those sort of voices in my ear, uh, you know, I wouldn't have the same picture of the world that I have now. So I do think that the audience is migrating to things that are more relevant to them, and it creates the it creates an opportunity for the savvy marketer to take advantage of that. But it requires more work in terms of contextualizing the message for those audiences.

SPEAKER_01 22:58

And when you talk about more work contextualizing savvy marketers, a thing that pops into my head is uh-oh, AI. No, no, what do you think AI's role is in all of this?

SPEAKER_03 23:09

So I think AI is the single greatest crisis that has ever faced marketing. It's a crisis because as Shelley Palmer said on a stage in uh CES this year, everything you think you know about marketing is headwind to your ability to adopt AI. That was scary to me. As a lifelong marketer, as another lifelong marketer, we need to rethink all of the org structure and the way that work gets done, our go-to-market, how we divine audiences, how we engineer relevance in every interaction in terms of creative. At the same time, the opportunity piece of this is we can finally reinvent, and we can reinvent where in an era where the marketer can take a little bit more control, and we're not looking at bad KPIs as proxies. We actually have intense signal about what the consumer is interested in, and AI is going to help us do that as a tool for humans, not as a replacement for humans. I've said for 25 years, you've heard me say it before, that marketing is an art that is informed by ever-improving science. Well, with AGI, the science just got a lot better, but it's still an art. In order to break through to an audience, you can't do an adaptation of what you did last time. You have to do something new and bold and different. And that is not AI's superpower, it is a human superpower.

SPEAKER_01 24:32

Uh 100%. I mean, everything that I write about with the air method, you know, authenticity, inspiration, and relatability, it establishes trust. That's right. That's the book. But but it's it's so true because those elements do not exist. They don't come out of an AI engine.

SPEAKER_03 24:51

You you're not gonna get In fact, the opposite, AI slow.

SPEAKER_01 24:54

That's right. That's right. I just wrote about that.

SPEAKER_03 24:56

One of the companies I work for is Ad Fontes Media, and Ad Fontes Media rates the news on bias and reliability. The CEO called me up about three weeks ago and she said, we are seeing major news platforms that have policy against using AI actually having content come out that our human raters see as AI driven. It's it's just a little wrong. And so we came up with the, she came up with a term called AI slip, and it's slipping through their editorial. Yeah. It's a drug. I mean, I know you use it in your business, I use it in my business. I'll take it as a first draft, but nothing that AI creates is something that I send to my clients. I rewrite it, I adapt it, I put my spin on it. So again, it's a tool. Yeah. But we need to watch out for is this human in the loop content? Was the human driving or just slightly editing? Yeah. And I think consumers, particularly young people, will get very savvy.

SPEAKER_01 25:51

Oh, absolutely. And I see, you know, my kids are tired of AI in certain areas where, you know, the Gen Xers like me are like, no, no, AI is good here, here, and here. And they're like, that's okay. We can kind of do without it. I do have slight concerns that uh, you know, people are not going to be problem solvers anymore. They're going to lose that ability to be solution focused because AI makes it a little too easy to give you an answer. Answer might be wrong, but they don't know that because they don't know how it got there. So there's a lot of opportunities.

SPEAKER_03 26:22

This is why someone, you know, who's been in the industry 36 years now. I'm not worried about people like you and I because we have perspective. We've managed large teams and we've done it right. But it's also done wrong and made mistakes, which also gives us learning. So that's like but you're right. The young generations coming up won't have that same perspective. They won't have to build with craftsmanship. And we need to think about that because I do think the pipeline of young talent is going to diminish because some jobs are better done by AI, researching for you know, concepts or uh whatever it might be that that is more of a rote, repetitive kind of task, but that's gonna shrink the pipeline and it's gonna shrink the perspective of people. And so we're gonna have to solve that. But you remember when digital started Well, you're too young.

SPEAKER_01 27:09

Oh no, I was there.

SPEAKER_03 27:10

It was gonna take all the jobs. I think it grew exponentially with digital.

SPEAKER_01 27:15

I just had this conversation with uh a young professional who was looking for some mentoring advice. And when I started to talk to her about, you know, when email first started and when the internet and the web first started, people started freaking out. And then when digital media first started, everybody started freaking out. Now she looked at me like, did the dinosaur come in and stop everything? You know, but after I got over that, but it it is really just uh just another shift.

SPEAKER_03 27:42

It's gonna be empowerment for creative people, and maybe we're all gonna become creators in our own way, and we're gonna have this incredible toolbox called AGI, and it's gonna help us make things that consumers want to consume again with talented humans in the loop. And I really believe that's our feet.

SPEAKER_01 28:00

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for being on Lyft Up. This has been a fabulous conversation. All right, welcome back. We're here, you guys, with my hero of life and the woman who inspires me beyond anything. I'm so honored to have her here, Lana McGilby. Don't you make that side eye at me? I can see I would say back at you, Jeannie. Oh no, no, no. Lana, you have built one of the most amazing, powerful, and inspirational businesses, not because you're like whipped cracking, crazy hard worker, but because you care so much about people and the world and creating just a positive exposure for brands and people and businesses that matter. And and that you don't see often.

SPEAKER_00 28:59

So that's amazing. Well, if you can see it, you can be it. And Jeannie, you were really, really important to me. You still are very important to me at a very early stage of my career, our careers. Uh, and I'd like to think I learned a little bit of that from you. You certainly care a lot too. So thank you.

SPEAKER_01 29:17

Thank you. Thank you. But let's I I just want to talk about, you know, what has driven you in your career to do to take the path that you've taken. You know, what has made you the successful entrepreneur that you are today?

SPEAKER_00 29:33

Uh I think caring, uh, I do love people. And this is a business where I think that comes in handy. Uh advertising is completely interconnected, right? You have it's a relationship business, despite all the technology and all the AI that we've brought forward, the relationships still matter. And a lot of times we're serving B2C brands that are all about people at the end of the day. So I think that's important. But also, I love the teams. And I remember when I met you, you were running very large teams, I think at Ogilvie. And then you were starting things like the email marketing committee, and then you went brand side, and you know, you you're an all-star CMO, but could you have done it without the teams?

SPEAKER_01 30:20

No, absolutely not. I mean, it really is all about the people, and I've no idea who said to me, always look for people smarter than you, always look for people who are experts than you. But I feel like, I mean, even you and I, we've we've worked our way in all of those areas so you know what's possible to know what to expect from who an expert should be to push you to, right?

SPEAKER_00 30:40

Yeah, that's true. It's it's becoming harder though now than ever because the pace of business is so fast. And right now, I think earlier in my career, maybe still we act with intuition, but now you have to check your intuition a little bit because when you're data driven, sometimes you find out things that are important for you to know that may not be positive. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:06

Well, you know, what a million years ago when I was at gray, I hired a woman from my intuition who back then scandalous, didn't have a college degree. Uh-oh. I mean, it was scandalous back in the late 90s to do something like that. But I knew she had potential and I brought her in and she became one of the most um successful employees on the team because she worked hard, she wanted to learn more, she wanted to invest in herself. Do you still see that in talent today?

SPEAKER_00 31:35

All the time. But I wonder, you know, the question that I have for you is we do see it in talent all the time. And sometimes, uh at least with teams that I've when I was a part of a team or I had teams reporting into me, which is more often now, sometimes you wouldn't share a fact like that, that you didn't have a college degree. What's really been inspiring to me lately, especially during the pandemic, was how giving people are about the facts, whether they have intellectual like learning disabilities or challenges that they're facing, and being able to share that and ask the team and me and those, you know, on leading the companies if if they'll actually help support. And I think that's the difference. I I used to hide things. I was I was embarrassed just to be a woman. I was embarrassed to be a woman in the industry, which is so strange.

SPEAKER_01 32:27

I was never embarrassed to be a woman in the industry, especially one that wore high heels. But I would never, nobody ever knew if I was married, not married, had kids, didn't have kids, lived where I live, nothing. No, no personal information at all.

SPEAKER_00 32:40

Well, when you and I were in email, they used to refer to us as the email females, and that's when I thought it was odd that I was a woman. I didn't think it was so strange that there were so few of us that they would label us email females. Uh I don't feel that way anymore at all. In fact, uh I also feel it's table stakes.

SPEAKER_01 32:58

Now, if you don't show who you are, yeah, you don't establish trust and credibility with people that you are.

SPEAKER_00 33:04

Agreed. And I think who you are actually matters so much right now. I think people really are interested in making sure that they're working with people that are ethical and authentic and intelligent and smart and that care about them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:18

Yeah. Well, so when I was interviewing for this one role, um, I had like the horror situation of I it was in a different city. I woke up, um, the place where I was staying didn't have a hair dryer right after this after I got out of the shower. My meeting was nowhere near where a place where I could dry my hair. So I'm air drying it and spinning in circles to try and get to this meeting and brushing out. And I get there and I'm super paranoid that my hair looks awful. And the girl that is interviewing me, she just looks at me and I thought she was gonna be strange to look and I said, Oh, I'm really sorry that there was no hair dryer where I was staying. And she goes, Oh my God, I totally never dry my hair either. So I get a job offer because I shared a story about being embarrassed and not drying my hair. And I thought that was the funniest thing. And I think that's when it clicked for me that like people want to know these things that make you authentic and vulnerable about who you are. They want to know that you're just like them and you wake up and sometimes things don't go well, or you have to rush your kids somewhere, or something comes up crazy. And um, I think that's part of success in today's environment.

SPEAKER_00 34:24

Yeah, and it's what makes us all interesting, especially, I mean, very few people have had one role their entire careers.

SPEAKER_01 34:30

Well, not anymore. Definitely not anymore.

SPEAKER_00 34:32

Oh, for sure. Uh, but you know, we have colleagues, uh Richie Glassberg, who founded the IAB. Yeah. I mean, I'll never forget that he was a radio broadcaster and you know it every time you hear his voice. And just really understanding where people are coming from, you know, their perspectives, it's it's makes our industry so interesting. Absolutely. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 34:53

But let's shift a little bit and talk about outside the industry. So you are going on this incredibly amazing trip for a very powerful personal adventure on your side.

SPEAKER_00 35:06

I am. I'm going to the Vatican May 31st through June 5th with 40 teens from war-torn countries, and they are going to build the future of peace together. There are seven American students, there are students from sub-Saharan Africa, uh quite a few students from Ukraine. And uh, I actually can't believe that we're going. And I'm getting a chance to go with my mentor, Kathleen Hessert, who was one of the original broadcast anchors in the US. And it's really bringing uh us together in a really special way, all around purpose. We have worked together many, many times for technology companies, for athletes, for CEOs. But this is really one of the first times that it's purely humanitarian and it's really special to you. So thanks for asking.

SPEAKER_01 36:06

I mean, this trip couldn't have come at a better, at a better time, at a more opportune time to show a bright light and a path former.

SPEAKER_00 36:14

Oh, I could not agree more. And believe it or not, it's right before the Fourth of July, Independence Day. So this is it's really special to me. It's also coming at a time in my career, Jeannie, we have children. I'm about to be an empty nester. And so, you know, shortly after my last child graduates, I'll be headed out there with 40 teens again. So it's it's really a fulfilling mission, and I'm very excited to learn from those students. I I'm really excited. Yeah. Hopefully the walls of the Vatican don't crack when I arrive. But I am I'm excited.

SPEAKER_01 36:55

Hey, well, if they haven't cracked it yet from everything that's been going on, I don't know. It's true. I did watch Godfather 3 uh not too long ago, and there was a trip to the Vatican in there too. But uh Yeah, it's been a busy place. It's been a busy place over over the years. But but I think um, you know, so so for the the people that go on the trip, for the teens that go on the trip, um will you then be a mentor to them moving forward? Will they have an opportunity to to be have a special part in your life?

SPEAKER_00 37:29

I I guess as oh, they already have a special part in my life. We've learned so much about the experiences of the kids and then just kids being kids, right? Asking each other if they have fast food in each other's home countries. Uh, but it's not just me. I'm we're really, really lucky. There were several brands and organizations, including a regenerative wearable brand called DNA Vide and Skolos and Civics Unplugged, who are helping the kids take what they learn around peace building at the Vatican and then practice it back home. So it's not gonna end, and we're really lucky. And I don't even think she knows this, but I think you know her. I'm a huge fan of Kim Storen, who's the chief marketing officer of Zoom now and an all-star CMO as well. And I haven't been able to finish the call. We're in phone tag right now, but you know, most of the conversations have been happening on Zoom. So they they've been powering a lot of this mission, and I don't even think they know it.

SPEAKER_01 38:30

That's that's that's so it's it's so great. And like I said, it just it just gives me chills. So you are a dynamic, inspirational, professional, human person. And I'm so glad that you're able to spend a few minutes with us here on Liftoff.

SPEAKER_00 38:44

Oh, Jeannie, thank you so much to you and the team. I'm so excited for liftoff. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 38:50

Well, that was amazing, right? That's the episode. If you got something out of this conversation, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Hit follow on Liftoff Journeys wherever you listen so you don't miss the rest of our special series. And come find us and follow us at Liftoff Show on any social channel. I want to know which of these guests you'd grab coffee with and why. I'm Jeannie Weldon. Until next, Liftoff.