Cotton Delo

Keith Reinhard got his first taste of the ad business from the tiny grocery store in northeast Indiana where his mother worked as a clerk when he was a boy. The store didn’t have room to post the promotional materials from the likes of Kraft, General Mills and Mars, so he took them home to study them, intrigued by the logos and type.

Interpublic Group CEO Michael I. Roth took an unusual path to the top of the ad industry. He was a tax attorney and then an insurance executive and was running Mutual of New York before he came to IPG in 2005. While he finds there’s some similarity between being a tax attorney and an ad holding company CEO — like the focus on servicing clients — the ad industry is certainly unique.

LONDON — Back when SMG’s Pippa Glucklich was a university student writing her dissertation about women in advertising, just 14% of senior executives in the ad industry in the UK were women. Now, two decades later, the percentage has increased, but only to 25%. “Our industry in the UK is absolutely split 50/50 at entry level, and by the time you get to the top it’s only 25% [female], so that is a concern,” says Glucklich, the co-CEO at SMG London in this interview with Beet.TV.