Alison Monk, CEO of Eden Collective; Ruth Bernstein, Yard NYC CEO and a 2023 Ad Age Leading Women honoree; Stacey Ryan-Cornelius, Ogilvy’s global chief financial officer and a 2024 honoree; and Ad Age Editor-in-Chief Jeanine Poggi at the Aug. 7 Leading Women luncheon.
Ad Age brought several top female executives on stage at its 2024 Leading Women luncheon on Aug. 7 to discuss a wide array of topics, ranging from reverse mentorship, or what younger generations can teach more senior executives, to the impact of caregiving on women in the workforce.
The luncheon honored Ad Age’s Rising Stars and 2024 class of Leading Women, the latter of which is in its 28th year, celebrating women pushing advertising and marketing forward amid an ever-changing landscape.
The event also featured a fireside chat with the 2024 Vanguard Award recipient Esi Eggleston Bracey.
Below are six takeaways from the panel sessions at the luncheon that can help any leader succeed and advance in their career.
Mentorship is critical for any professional, no matter how senior you are. This was the theme of a panel discussion between mentor pair Native Tongue Communications Founder-CEO Marissa Nance, a 2023 Leading Women honoree, and Alex Cuevas, senior VP and director of talent at BBDO Worldwide.
Though Nance, an industry veteran and former longtime executive at Omnicom’s OMD, originally linked up with Cuevas to mentor her, Nance said she soon found that she also wanted to receive mentorship from Cuevas. The two stressed on stage the importance of their relationship and receiving mentorship throughout one’s career.
“Even though I knew what I wanted to do in my company, as a person, I could use someone to come in and say, ‘You’re OK,’” Nance said of Cuevas. “And that’s what this woman does every single day.”
Read more: How junior ad employees can help senior execs
The best way to get the most out of a mentorship is to set specific goals so you can track success, Cuevas said. That way you can tell if a mentorship isn’t “gelling” and neither person wastes their time, plus it makes it easier to respectfully move on from the relationship.
“It’s so important to set the expectation and be clear,” Cuevas said. “When something doesn’t work, there’s no point in dragging it out.”
Eggleston Bracey stressed the importance of bringing your whole self to work during her fireside chat. She began her career at Procter & Gamble, followed CoverGirl and other beauty brands when they moved from P&G to Coty, and then joined Unilever in 2018, where she became the company’s first Black female chief marketer globally last year.
“No one can do you better than you,” Eggleston Bracey said on stage. “When I first joined corporate America, I knew very little about business. I didn’t recognize that I was chosen, that I was selected by Procter & Gamble for my job based on the talents I had more than the experience that I had. So I mimicked and looked around me at everyone else, people that didn’t look like me. Back then, decades ago, there were not a lot of women and certainly not women of color.”
She said she then had an “aha moment” during a P&G diversity training session, at which it was revealed many junior women couldn’t relate to more senior women because they saw them as essentially emulating the men who surrounded them.
“And the diversity trainer was saying it wasn’t the fault of the senior women,” Eggleston Bracey told the audience. “It’s what the senior women had to take on to survive in the workplace. And I was thinking, ‘Well, those women shouldn’t sell out.’ And I was like, ‘My god, that’s what I’m doing.’”
After that realization, she made a deliberate choice to bring her whole self to work. “And it really started with my hair,” she said, deciding then to wear it natural.
At Unilever, Eggleston Bracey has since been the architect of Dove’s support for the CROWN (Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair) Coalition, which has succeeded in helping pass Crown Act laws against hair discrimination in 27 states.
Transparency and the need for honesty came up during a panel discussion on how to manage personal hardships while running a company. The panel featured Ruth Bernstein, the CEO of Yard NYC (and a 2023 Leading Women honoree); Stacey Ryan-Cornelius, Ogilvy’s global chief financial officer (and a 2024 Ad Age Leading Woman); and Alison Monk, CEO of Eden Collective.
Ryan-Cornelius said being honest with your company and employer is one of the most important things to do when dealing with a personal hardship. She said she was upfront about what she was dealing with at home when she was caring for her mother, a diabetic amputee.
“We’re in a relationship industry,” Ryan-Cornelius said, noting that she had to be “brutally honest” with Ogilvy, parent holding company WPP and clients that there were things she needed to do at home to take care of her mother as well as her kids. “She was almost my third child in a way because I cared for her and I was nervous about her as much as I would my own child … I was like, ‘I don’t have a wife at home. I’m the wife. I’m the caregiver.’”
Being in the right headspace and managing your mental health is also critical, several women said.
Eggleston Bracey shared during her fireside that she recently dealt with a scare in her family when her husband suffered an aortic dissection and nearly died. She ended up having to work London hours from Phoenix, where her husband was at the time of the incident and remained hospitalized, while her kids were in New York.
“He made it,” she said, but her being able to juggle the caretaking of her family and her work while dealing with this crisis came down to her mindset.
Eggleston Bracey said she relied on one of her main principles as a leader, which is to “manage your energy, not your time,” which essentially means she digs for “more energy” from all of her roles—mother, wife and executive—to then be able to do more. “Energy is not finite, it grows. Time is finite. So if I can get more energy, I’m good,” she said.
But Eggleston Bracey also stressed that she couldn’t do it alone. She said she had to rely on a “village” to help her cope and deal with things at home and in the workplace during that time.
“If men don’t ask for directions, women don’t ask for help very often,” Bernstein said at the luncheon.
She and others discussed the stigmas that exist around women asking for help and feeling like they need to take on everything themselves, whether it be in their personal or professional lives.
Bernstein reminded the audience to not only be a caregiver but a “care receiver."
“When I started my agency, I thought I had to be the strong one. I had to be the one that people could rely on. And that, I learned quickly, was a one-way relationship. [Asking for help is] something that we need to learn how to do because it’s only in that two-way relationship where the connection is real,” she said.
Monk added that she learned to ask for help in her personal life, too.
“If you’re a single parent who works full time, you’re crazy if you try to rely on it on your own,” Monk said. “My nanny was the co-parent for me when my children’s father really wasn’t present; she took them to the doctor’s appointments, she made them dinner. There are too many women trying to do too much.”
Several speakers discussed how to navigate the stigma that comes with being a female executive amid this idea that women should be caregivers.
“We’re talking a lot about sort of the societal expectations around this idea of caregiver, but I also think it is truly about societal expectations of what it means to behave as a woman,” Monk said, noting that if you as a female executive are not getting the proper support from your company or that you feel your employer is placing these stigmas on you, “leave as fast as you can.”
Being a female leader in the ad and marketing industry, which is predominantly made up of white men, can also come with a certain level of pressure to perform and blaze the trail for others because often you are the “first.” This is especially true for women of color.
Eggleston Bracey knows all about holding that “first" title—before becoming Unilever’s first Black female chief marketer globally, she was P&G’s first Black female general manager and the first Black president of Unilever USA.
“I’m very committed to diversity and equity, and so I take my role seriously,” she said. “At the same time, I choose to not have that be the first thing that sits with me, the pressure, because that’s too much from day to day. What I try to do is be mindful of my purpose … I try to be excellent in all that I do, make a difference in all that I do, and it’s that that I carry over. I’m aware that it means a lot. I’m aware that other people’s success is dependent on my success, but I do not keep that as primary because it’s for me.”
