I’ve been following Cindy Gallop for some time on LinkedIn—she’s one of those LinkedIn influencers who certainly takes the boring out of the platform. If there is one word that I would use to describe her, it’s provocative, and I know that I’m not alone in feeling that way—she caught the attention of my moderator friend and colleague Laura Nozicka too. So, when Cindy said yes to an interview request, I just had to bring Laura along for the ride, and I am so glad that I did.
MEET CINDY GALLOP
Cindy has been called the Michael Bay of Business because, well ,she likes to blow things up. Her background includes over 30 years in brand-building, marketing and advertising. She started up the US office of ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) in New York in 1998 and in 2003 was named Advertising Woman of the Year. She didn’t come onto the show to talk about that, though—she was eager to promote her new venture MakeLoveNotPorn and we had a blast—and learned a lot—but speaking with her.
KEY TOPICS IN THIS EPISODE:
- How an empathy building exercise led her to start dating younger men
- Why she started MakeLoveNotPorn (MLNP)
- Why she believes MLNP can change relationship dynamics for the better and put a nail in the coffin of rape culture
- How diversity is the backbone of empathy
- The importance of building diverse teams so that advertising can better reflect (and not stereotype) the consumers who are targeted by it
KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM OUR TALK WITH CINDY
- Sex Education Needs to Change. In the United States, we do not do a great job teaching our kids about sex beyond reproduction. In turn, kids watch pornography and learn about sex in a way that is not truthful and that can damage interpersonal relationships. MLNP is meant to show sex using real couples and provides a more truthful look at sexual relationships.
- We Must Do Better. We need to hire, mentor, reward, and promote women and people of color in our creative teams in order to end stereotypes in advertising and speak to the people we are creating for in more relevant ways and using more relevant messages.
- The Best is Yet to Come. The marketing industry’s best days are ahead of it, and we won’t see them until we start building more diverse leadership and creative teams including women and people of color.
HOW TO GET IN TOUCH WITH CINDY
MLNP Website: https://makelovenotporn.tv/
Website: https://cindygallop.com/
Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cindygallop/
MEMORABLE QUOTES FROM CINDY
“Advertising is an industry dominated by white men, especially in the creative department. You don’t have young, single black female creatives, or, importantly, older, single, black female creatives, who are in those creative departments with the power to create the ads that would really speak to you and me. Don’t even get me started on older women in advertising. Advertising is racist as hell. We need to end stereotypes in advertising. When you’re a young, white male creative, it’s really easy to default to a heterosexual married couple, you know, because you are dealing in stereotypes, because that’s all you know. Whereas if you are an older black woman, creating the ad, boy oh boy we’d be represented very differently in that ad. That’s the problem. It all goes back to hire, promote, welcome, champion, reward, compensate, and value diverse talent. And you’ll be amazed at the creative output that you then get. Our industry thinks that its glory days are over. Our industry’s glory days have not even begun, because we have not even begun to see what our industry could be with the talents and skills and creativity of women and people of color.”
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