Welcome to Hal leaders lead where every week you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I break down the key learning so that by the end of the episode, you'll have something simple you can apply as you develop into a better leader. That's what this podcast is all about. You know, for us leaders, there's just nothing quite as exciting as a good idea . You see all that potential, you just get so excited about the creativity. And I mean, as a leader, it just gives you a rush. But for a lot of leaders, what comes next is a real struggle. They've got this really good idea, but they don't know how to build traction for it and give it the buy-in that it deserves. That's why I'm excited for you to hear from Gail Trowerman today. She's the president and chief marketing officer of iHeart Media. They've got 850 broadcast stations putting music, news and podcast in the ears of 90% of Americans, 90%. So for Gail, that means a great idea can have a whole lot of impact. And boy, she attacking big ideas. She's a vibrant creative leader, but she doesn't just have good ideas. She knows how to elicit those ideas from her team. And she knows how to make sure they actually get traction and become reality. If you want to learn how to fight for big ideas, then keep listening. Because here's my conversation with my good friend and soon to be yours, Gail T rowerman. Tell us a little bit about iHeart Media and the scope of your business. Sure, iHeart at its core is right now 850 broadcast radio stations, live on air , unscripted, real humans, open mics, having a conversation with 9 out of 10 Americans every month. That's the core of our business and it fuels all the other pieces of our business that we've built. We're the number one podcast network. Most titles, the most downloads, the most listens, the most creators built on our broadcast radio reach and scale. We connect artists and fans and brands at massive scale every day to have really human connected conversations. That's fantastic and you're huge, yet you've described iHeart as the nation's biggest startup. What makes you feel that way? I work for a phenomenal entrepreneur. Bob Pittman is our CEO very much believes in and he founded MTV back when he was 24 and he's been CEO of a ton of amazing organizations and he's very much an entrepreneurial leader. I grew up at Microsoft which was also for its size and scale. In the back in the day, particularly when I was there, it was very much an entrepreneurial culture. That means it's okay to test and learn. We have a corporate value that urgency wins, chaos is okay, things that a lot of companies rebel against and it's really important particularly because of the nature of our business. The fact that I honestly don't know what my product is right now. It is in the hands of all of these creators who have massive audiences and they 're deciding what they're going to talk about, what every episode of stuff you should know should cover. What do people care about today on their way home from work in Cincinnati or Detroit or Miami or New York? The fact that we work in this very rapidly changing organic medium, it really helps keep our culture agile I guess is the probably overused word but I've never worked in a culture where you can have an idea today. In this conversation, you could pitch me something, we could go, "That's amazing, we should do it." We could literally be live on air on 850 stations with it tomorrow. I didn't realize in all the marketing I'd done at Microsoft and other companies just how crazy fast an agile audio could be. Even more than digital, it's about a tenth the cost and a tenth the time on the production side. Speed of sound is a very real mantra here at iHeart. Well, I really want to dive deep into how you lead at iHeart but before I do that, you did spend 16 years of your career climbing the ranks at what you would call another little startup, Microsoft. Tell me one of your favorite stories from the early days. It was fascinating. I had worked in New York in big agencies in the late 80s, early 90s and New York was very much business culture, very clear who had the corner offices and the C-suite decision makers would come into rooms and decide and make decisions. When I got to Microsoft, the first thing that really blew my mind was you go into a room and I'm this new nobody in this internet, secret internet projects and you didn 't know who was the most important person. One of the things that always blew my mind there was that there really was, there was just so much diversity of thought, of age, of backgrounds, of cultures and it really was a place where everyone got heard and then eventually somebody who had to make the decision would be like, "Okay, I heard everything. We're going to go do this." But sitting at the table and not being able to discern because of how expensive someone's watch was or the power suit they were wearing. There really weren't these artifices of hierarchy at Microsoft in ways that I think created a much more egalitarian world. The fact that there just weren't those clues that I was used to, that was the first thing that blew my mind there. As I understand it, when you were at Microsoft, you created marketing campaigns for internet startups and this was a time when the internet was the wild wild west. I mean, it was just- Kind of like the metaverse today, yes. What did you learn from that experience scale? It's so easy to look back at so many of the lessons learned now that seemed so obvious. But back in the day, everything was new and we were trying things and everything was a first. So we really were creating what we didn't realize were entirely new disciplines at the time. We started emailing people about a product called Sidewalk in Seattle and we'd find people who had email lists because probably only 10% of the population were on the internet at that point. And so we'd start emailing people and say, "Hey, we've got this new city guide ." We're like, "That became email marketing." We did branded content before that was a thing. We called it custom publishing with brands. We created new ad types. Many of them horrible. Leave behind ads. Over the page ads. We had to learn like people don't love being interrupted between the thing they chose to go to and the actual content they wanted. And we learned all of these amazing lessons about how to build businesses at the time. We didn't really realize all of those things that we were using as little marketing tools for Expedia or CarPoint or HomeAdvisor or Sidewalk were actually going to become entire marketing disciplines and ecosystems. We did some of the first submit a video. We did a project with Visa years and years and years ago way ahead of its time with dial up speed where you had to create a video to pitch a business idea that Visa would fund. And we were blown away. I think we got something like back in the day maybe 10, 20,000 videos submitted . And it was so it was Shark Tank meets YouTube back in the day. And we were blown away by the level of engagement back then because these are not easy things to go do or submit. And yeah, I should have created a business for each and every one of them and I would I wouldn't be retired now. I don't think you'd be retired. You love what you're doing too much. You're a worker. I could don't. You enjoy that. You know, and well speaking of first, you became Microsoft's first chief creative officer. You know, tell me the story about how that role came together. I worked for our CMO at the time at Microsoft who was a real original Microsoft employee, one of the early early early crew building that business. And we were fighting some really aggressive marketing battles. So Apple had started running a little campaign you may recall the I'm a Mac. I'm a PC ads at massive scale on TV every night. And Mitch Matthews, who was the CMO at the time. She called me up and she was like, you know, the I'm a Mac. I'm a PC ads. Have you seen that campaign? And I was like, of course. And she's like, well, we really need to respond. Typically, we marketed Windows when a new version came out and we do a big new version. We'd market with all the hardware PC makers and people would go buy new laptops and with them you would get Windows and Office and we didn't really have to market Windows as a consumer product. So Apple, as they were getting more aggressive forced us to do that. And she called me and she was like, so I'd love to go hire one of those, you know, genius creatives out there in the Adland like so and so or so. And so she's like, but I'm not sure they can survive the discipline of Microsoft. So would you come run advertising? And I had taken that job and I got into it and we hired those amazing agencies and creative geniuses and we're really doing some terrific marketing work and holding our ground on, you know, Windows share, which was enormous. And then it became clear the more I got into running advertising at Microsoft that 90% of my job was becoming organizational and operational because we're marketing in 31 countries around the world with local marketing teams and national teams and Mitch was wise enough to see that and say, I have a million people at this company who can go operationalize. It's an engineering culture. She's like, I really need you to take these great ideas that people bring us and navigate them around Redmond and make sure they don't break before they get into the world. And that was, I think the first client side chief creative officer role that she created because we were very good at taking genius ideas and letting the masses of opinions kind of iterate them out of relevance as we navigated the company. First job, one of the best jobs I ever had by far, so much fun and I learned so much from a lot of those agency gurus. Well, you're a renowned creative person in your own right and you know, there are a lot of people struggle with being creative. What kind of advice would you give people on how they can become maybe even more creative than they think they are? You know, for me, I think creativity and risk taking and conviction are so intertwined. It's really believing in an idea enough to let it breathe, let it find oxygen, let it find dollars, let it find a platform to get into the world. And a lot of time that takes pushing against the norms, breaking rules, doing things that make you uncomfortable. We've been wrestling with a lot of that here at iHeart2 and we do phenomenally well with consumers and you know, like I said, we reach nine out of ten consumers. We have phenomenal platforms in podcasting and events and of course all our radio brands and personalities, but we struggle a little bit with marketers. Marketers don't quite understand the power of audio and then the power of i Heart as the leader in audio. And so, you know, I've been wrestling a lot with trying to take my own advice about how do I actually break some of the rules and be to be marketing? And how do I get some of the most cynical people on the planet who play this marketing game every day to pay attention and be willing to take a risk? Because doing what you've always done is an easy way to not get fired. Doing the new big innovative things that could get you fired is usually how you do the best work of your career. So I think a lot of it is just really being willing to take a risk. Yeah, I couldn't agree more as there's some great insight there. And you mentioned earlier about some of your Microsoft meetings where you'd be in there with the engineer and you were the marketing person that you guys would fight it out. And you've actually said that one of the things you learned at Microsoft was the importance of having a culture where passionate people really fight for their ideas. How are you bringing that same mentality to your own team there at iHeart? COVID was such an interesting ride. I think I know for us as a leadership team at iHeart, I feel like I was able to get some bolder, more transformative new ideas and programs out into the world. And one of the things I took away from that is so often, you know, we have a pretty large leadership team that's geographically distributed. And because of obviously the urgency of COVID, the massive business pressures we were all facing and the fact that we were now on this team's or Zoom like device, I realized the power of all of us on the same call, looking each other in the eye and just saying yes or no. And I've really, it sounds like such a simple thing. You know, we have so many meetings in the course of your day or your week about one small topic, but having consistency with my peers and in programming and events and podcasting and to just go, you know, what should we do? Here's a moment. We have a problem. We need revenue here or we need to reach people there and getting all of us together to just usually it only takes an hour to go, what's possible? What can we do? Are we all in? If we're all in? Great. Now we can work with our teams to go execute. So that was one big takeaway. We used to rely on being in rooms together so much and we're starting to get pretty good at communicating with like asynchronous docs. And you know, it's so much faster if you have 20 people, you want to pick their brains to just throw up a question and have everyone break into small groups, type in what they came out of it with. And we've been working with some consultants and stuff too to just get better at the speed of, you don't need meetings with 20 people to get ideas and then write them up and then vet them again and then take them here and take them there and take them through 18 steps. If we can just collapse some of that linear process into a single meeting using technology, that's something, you know, I wouldn't say we've mastered but we're definitely on a journey and we're really seeing again for the speed we move, these kind of tools are invaluable. Get 20 people's ideas, raw, rough, but they're written there in front of you and you can, you all know, you go, oh my God, that's the one. And it's usually somebody who might not have even been in the meeting if we'd scheduled it as more of an in-person situation. One thing every great leader knows is that your life and your career is just way too important to delegate to someone else. 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It's so obvious that you have such a strong action orientation, sense of urgency. Obviously, you're a creative person. It's hard to find people that have those skills that I just described all wrapped up into one. How involved do you get in the hiring process? How do you make sure you're bringing in people like yourself that aligns with what you want to have happen on your team? I would almost argue the opposite, David. I may not need tons more people like me. I need people who think differently than me. I think we need good pairings of super creative people versus super strategic thinkers versus analysts versus people who are more operational. So when a creative person has a crazy idea, somebody operational can go, "Oh, let me break that down." We could build this, do that, put that there. For me, it's always about building teams that are more multi-hyphenate. People who understand and respect creativity, but not just teams of creatives. One thing that I've observed, people like yourself, who are creative and you're able to come up with the ideas, you say, "I don't need people like me. That sounds really nice, but what happens if you go away?" No, I'd certainly need something. We have a killer creative edge, but yeah. Because I think people like yourself, you're so good at what you do. A lot of times you take it for granted, but it's pretty hard to find people who have that idea generation capability. Yeah. I think you have to create environments where people feel comfortable sharing ideas where there's no right or wrong idea. I get dinged a lot. It's funny. I think fast. I talk fast. It's just how I operate. I think so often people misinterpret that as, "I have to have the right idea." I'll also be the first one to look at a breakout session and go, "That, oh my God. That's an idea." I don't even care who's idea was or where it came from. It's like, "That's a better idea," or, "That makes this idea better." Do you think that's the world we live in and in a collaborative world, particularly at iHeart where we're reaching nine out of ten Americans? We've also got to really think about a diverse team in all of the dimensions, diverse backgrounds. I think marketing, it's not like we're doing surgery. I think there's so many amazing marketers who didn't grow up in marketing or study marketing, but really just have good instincts about people or about business. I always look for diversity of all types, cultural, gender, geographic, age, every kind of diversity, I think makes us better, particularly when our product is for everyone. We really need to take all of that into account. Do you have a time when you could look back and you say you and your team had an idea that you really had to fight for that people didn't get? I think the work I was recently talking about during COVID when I look back at some of these new franchises we built and built with other of my peers within iHeart who, again, they're not my ideas, they're great ideas that we got into the world. One of them that was phenomenal project was in June of year one of COVID, May, June, right around the George Floyd murder and the world was blowing up on so many levels and there's an exact really amazing leader at iHeart, Tony Coles. He'd had this sort of skunk works project he'd been bouncing around with an insight that black consumers don't trust news. They don't watch news, listen to news and trust news exponentially higher rates than the average American where trust isn't all that high either. And he had sort of this project he'd been batting around and all of a sudden lots of brands were trying to do things that mattered and reach black consumers in ways that matter. And we in a matter of like a month or so created a 24/7 black news network, BIN , the black information network at iHeart, we started flipping broadcast radio stations from other formats to 24/7 news. We're now up to about 35 stations around the nation, physical broadcast stations, and we have a national digital stream. We've become one of the biggest employers of black journalists because of that and it's all black journalists telling you the news through a lens for black listeners and anyone else. It's really high quality news, but we have to fund it. And if we go ask advertisers to come buy ads in it, then I'm going to be in sending the journalists to do everything that's corrupted journalism. Drive like the most salacious headlines to get the most clicks and the most listens and it all falls apart. And we said, how do we work around that? And we ended up deciding to get brands that really wanted a voice to the black consumer to co-fund the black information network with us. Eight founding partners, multi-year commitments, Bank of America, Lowe's, Sony, Geico, 23and me, McDonald's. We worked with those brands and said, we're not going to sell you ads. We're not going to report impressions. This is about your part of this network. You have access to our data. Our insights are journalists. You have at least 60 seconds an hour to do whatever you want with every day, all day, every station, national stream. And the question became less about who do I reach? And it got back to what do I have to say? And it changed the whole dynamic. The PR teams got at the table with the creative agencies and the media teams in ways that even within a lot of these companies, CBS is another partner is just talking to them about how this forced them to think differently about how they were bringing their messages out to this community. And it's just been a phenomenal journey. We are co-creating content. We're doing it with real journalists and some amazing brands. And we've created what's quickly becoming the most trusted news source for black consumers. And we're doing it with the brands. So the advertising isn't an evil. It's a critical part of the whole story. And there was a time, many times where you could have said, hey, it's just not going to work. It was the worst time to be, we were scraping together all of us. It was early COVID days. We didn't know what the outlook was going to look like. We didn't know if people would be spending again. We were scrambling. And it was certainly not the easiest way to go drive that amount of revenue. But it's become one of the most important projects we've ever done. And certainly there were a million naysayers along the way. And we had to go as high up as CEOs of some of these other organizations to get the kind of commitment we wanted. But really, it's fighting the naysayers and taking what sounded like a crazy idea to focus on at the time. And again, it's become the kind of project. I think anyone who touches it couldn't be more proud of the work that we're doing. And we created something that matters. You know, I understand you like getting in the weeds and getting your hands dirty. You know, while a lot of executives stay, you know, pretty high level. What do you think of the big advantages of having your ore in the water as a leader? And when did it really pay off for you? Working in early internet, learning audio, which I don't think is as well understood in the marketing world as it could be. What I love is to get in and really roll up my sleeves. I love a, you know, a strategic line job. I love to get in like with the Black Information Network. I was super hands on with the partner who leads that with the brands who were trying to figure out how to use this new platform in new ways. I don't do that necessarily all day, every day, anymore. But for me, getting in on these new projects, I loved kind of pushing my way around. I heard opening new doors, finding new talented humans who do different parts of the mix and figuring out what was possible. Now I apply those learnings to projects everywhere. You got to get in the kitchen a little bit to understand what you're eating later, right? Absolutely. Being in the food service business, I understand that metaphor. I'm sure. You know, something that is true for big companies, and I know you've seen it, is it can become very difficult to move quickly. How do you fight against that with your team at iHeart? Because, you know, you're getting bigger and bigger, you know? We certainly have a bias towards speed at iHeart. And I think it's, again, the nature of being in a company that's live on air all day every day versus maybe like an engineering culture where you're shipping a product every nine months or, you know, the cycles are very different. If you want to move fast, you have to be willing to trip. You're going to stumble. You know, you have to be willing and you have to have a culture that's very accepting of stumbling and learning and stumbling and learning. And very much that is the culture at iHeart. You know, as long as we're not making the same mistakes, we're learning new things each time and we're applying them. We have a really big appetite for stumbling on occasion. We just launched iHeartland in the metaverse. And I'll tell you, we, there is less I know about what iHeartland in the meta verse should be than I do know. And yet we're live and millions of people are enjoying these platforms and playing games as well listening to concerts. And it's just it'll be a phenomenal journey. But a lot of companies would would still be studying and researching what they should do. We just said, let's get at the smartest people we can inside and outside the company. Great partners like Fortnite and Roblox at the table. They know these worlds, you know, we know music, we know our fans, we know brands and we partnered and you know, it's been phenomenal. We opened State Farm Park in iHeartland in Roblox and you know, probably the biggest hit in there is Jake from State Farm, who's there issuing challenges and selling his polo and khakis to kids who acquire enough points. And it's just it's a phenomenal journey. And I love partners like State Farm who are in this case who are willing to take that leap with us and go, we know less than we then we should. And there's all kinds of risk, but we're going to make the smartest decisions we can and then we'll let consumers tell us what works. You've got a lot of people that you have to lead on your team. You know, what's a one-on-one coaching session like with Gail Trowberman? You know, I go back to a lot of times to the basics. Recently did a session for a big chunk of my team on some of the fundamentals. I started my career in PR and I still use this technique every day. Anytime you're going into it, whether it's a client pitch or a meeting with your manager where you want to convince them to do something, change something, invest in your program, your project, pretty much everything to me comes down to three ideas said multiple times with some support. It's never one idea. And when you have one idea, it's just relentless and no one hears it and they shut you out. And it's early PR training. If you say one thing, ten times, nothing gets remembered or heard. They just block it. If you say three things over and over and over again and keep coming back to them, you usually can start convincing people of your argument. There might be a different supporting point or a data point or a proof point, but only having three messages in anything you do, be it an internal meeting or an internal pitch or an external client program or project. I do a lot of mentoring around things like that. I call it the triangle. I do it for interviews. I do it for podcasts. I draw a triangle. I come up with the three most important things that need to be heard. And then I come up with some examples or support points. And it's the simplest thing in the world, but I try to coach people on that all the time. And it's a really good little technique that works for most things in life. We'll be back with the rest of my conversation with Gail Trowerman in just a moment. Now talking to Gail, it's clear every leader needs to know how to create a culture where big ideas thrive. As the CEO of Snap and the guy responsible for building Snapchat, Evan Spiegel knows a thing or two about big ideas. Evan was one of my very first guests on How Leaders Lead, and I love what he has to say about fostering innovation in his company. Well, in our business, innovation really is everything. The business moves so quickly and new companies and little startups come out of nowhere and take on these giant companies. And so remembering that that creativity and innovation really is at the core of business success means that you spend a lot of your time and energy thinking about how to feed that creativity. And so while kindness may seem like soft for people who aren't familiar with our culture, at the same time, it's absolutely vital to the core of the technology business because it allows people to really feel comfortable expressing themselves and take risks like that redesign. Because if we're not constantly reinventing ourselves, then someone else will come and do a better job than we are for our community. Go back and listen to my entire conversation with Evan, episode three here on How Leaders Lead. Yeah, I want to shift gears and take you back for a minute. Tell us a story from your childhood that impacted the kind of leader you are today. In fifth grade, I had a teacher, Mrs. Burns Stingle at Oakland Elementary School, and she was not a big fan of mine. I was smart, I did the work, but when it came to writing the essays or the papers on the book we were reading or whatever it was, I would find different ways in. Maybe it was a current song lyric or a TV show or something. And she hated the pop culture references. We had a lot of, it was a great little group of friends in that class. She called my mom in, and I always got good grades. So it wasn't like the person being called to the principal's office or whatever . She called my mom in for a conference, and she was like, you know, she's like, "Gail smart, but she's just never going to make it in this world, and you need to help her." Because she has potential, but she does not take life seriously. And look at this. She referenced a TV sci-fi series in this essay on this book. Look at this, you know, like music lyric in this paper and like stuff like that . And it was just, and it was amazing. A huge credit to my parents because they kind of just laughed about it. And like, you know, they were like, "I'm not going to stop you from being, you know, having fun and being funny." And it's a huge part of who you are. And they, you know, they sort of laughed off that moment. And for me, it was a really important moment. And I think we all face it at different change points in our lives. Like, "Are am I going to show up at Microsoft and iHeart?" You know, here on this podcast today is me, or is some version of who I'm supposed to be as the CMO, or the podcast guest. And you know, I made a decision right way back then that she might ding me for it and I might get a lesser grade, but you know, I was going to be me and believe in what I did and stand by it. And it served me fairly well so far. But I think Mrs. Bernstein called for that. I'd say so. You know, and I've heard you say that when it comes to content that consumers consume these days, you said, and I quote, "Our eyes are maxed, but our ears have bandwidth." Explain what you mean by that. In the digital age, we've gotten to this visual overload, right? I mean, look at the speed at which we swipe, right? While we're, we've got to screw this screen on, we've got a laptop, we've got a phone. Sometimes we have a TV screen. We're consuming all of this visual media all at once with really fairly low attention and low engagement. And we've learned it's a lot of it's becoming wallpaper and there's a ton of studies that show, you know, attention and engagement has been dropping with a lot of video media. But our ears are so much more attentive, right? The first thing you hear, if I say, "David," you go, "Well, you perk up right away. The sound of your own name is an incredibly powerful device." If you want to understand the simple power of audio, turn off the sound on a horror movie and just watch it and you'll see a bunch of people go, "You know, scrape me with hands flailing and running." And it just looks ridiculous. But you add that music bad underneath, right? You add those beats and, you know, your skin crawls and you're terrified and you're on the edge of your seat. And I think we're just starting to understand the power of audio for engagement now that our ears are wired to the grid more and more. So wireless headphones have really connected us in a new way to audio all the time. And that's why I think you're seeing radio growth through digital devices. You're seeing massive growth in podcast listening. It's really intimate and your brain is the production machine. And I don't think most people understand that about audio creative, right? The brain is the fastest production machine in the world. Would you have for lunch today, David? Can you see it? Was it good? Was it bad? Did you not have lunch, right? It was a pretty crummy protein bar, okay? There you go, see? Right? So if I took a leap and said, "Hey, you're, you know, I have all this data on you," right? You live here and you're this age and you work in this profession and da da da da da da. And therefore, I'm going to show you this lunch. I would be wrong every single time. But in audio, if I just said, "Hey, what do you have for lunch today?" Not so satisfying, was it? What if you could have a really healthy salad from so and so or a, right? Like all of a sudden, I have everyone using their own brain to put in the pictures and they're perfectly accurate. Do you remember your first kiss? What was the first movie you ever went to, right? All of a sudden, I can take you to any moment. Like, you know, where you bored last night, nothing to feel like you've watched everything there is to watch. Like, I can sell you almost anything and make it relevant for you through audio in a minute. And video, by creating the picture of it, I'm missing most of the consumers. My living room doesn't look like that. My kids aren't that clean and put together and attentive. You know, it's always wrong. So that's to me, the simple power of audio there is the brain is the best production machine in the world and in audio advertising. You get to really tap into it. There's something in the marketing space that you think is really going to shake things up, something that most people aren't even thinking about now. My biased answer is I think consumers were seeing spend about a third of their time with audio today. And for a lot of the reasons, we said smart speakers, wireless earbuds. And so I think right now we see about, like I said, 30% of consumer time and marketers are spending about 10% or less of their budgets. I'm starting to see the ad industry and the marketing industry really wake up to that audio gap and that potential of audio. And I know we're on to something when people are starting to ask the question of how do you do audio creative well? Because when people are excited about the how and the creative part of it, I think that's going to be really interesting. And then I mean, I think the metaverse and blockchain are just, they're going to change everything. If we learned anything from the internet. I remember asking like what people would or wouldn't buy on the internet. And we were, again, our guesses were so wrong and some things accelerated faster than others. But now you can't imagine a world without internet commerce. So I do think how identity is going to become a bigger, more important part of life in the metaverse. I think that's probably one of the most interesting things. I don't know what that means for us as marketers. Right? And blockchain will enable different types of commerce at the end. But I don't know what it means if I can really become someone something different and navigate a world that way. And I think that's going to be the biggest difference between, for me, the meta verse and the internet. You know, Gail, you know, it's been a lot of fun and I want to have some more fun with a lightning round of questions that I do. And I hope you're ready for this. You ready to go? Okay. Always dangerous, but let's go. Okay. What would be three words others would use to describe you? Creative, impatient, fun. Your biggest joy builder. People, humans. Your biggest joy blocker. Email. If you could be one person for a day beside yourself, who would it be and why? You know, I guess we're living in a world of anything is possible. I would love to have been in Jim Henson's head for a moment and see what a day in a life of muppeting was really all about. If I got in your car and turned on the radio, what would I hear? Oh, who depends who is driving last? You'd probably hear something loud and, and from of the eighties. If you could be in any band, what band and what instrument would you be playing ? I wish I had musical abilities. So, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to go back to, I think I'd like to be animal in that Muppet band. It seems like a very cathartic approach to music. What's the book on leadership that you learned the most from? I love strength finders. Good to great. I think a lot of those books were really about how to deploy what you're good at versus fighting the things you're just not. What's something about you that few people would know? I'm a wannabe golfer. I'll talk about that very much. So I've been hacking around trying to improve my game there. That's definitely probably off brand for me. All right. That wraps up our lightning round, but I have just a couple more questions and I'll let you go here. As you think about your career, what do you see as your unfinished business? I'd love to help save marketing from itself. I'd love to help educate and inform and then get back to what makes marketing great. I don't think it's a profession and a career that teens today go, I want to do that. And I'd love to help inspire people around how fun it can be to be a marketer and what's possible. In one sentence, how would you describe what makes marketing great? It's human psychology. It's the ability to really understand people, what makes them happy, what motiv ates them, what inspires them, what pisses them off, and then finding creative ways to get people who, let's face it, don't wake up every day and think about your brand or my brand the way we do. To get people to want to be part of the club, to want to come to the party that is your brand and want to be loyal and invested in it the way we are in our own brands and products. Like I think it's just such a great combination of psychology and creativity and data science. It really brings together a lot of disciplines and it's a game of trial and error. So you can always keep playing and learning. Last question. What's one piece of advice you'd give aspiring leaders? Just be fearless. You'll get knocked down. They'll be horrible days. Everyone won't agree. But if you have great ideas, just keep making sure they get heard. Well, Gail, you were in the absolute perfect place to keep doing that. Okay. You're at the great company making great things happen. And I want to thank you so much for taking the time to have this conversation. Oh, terrific. It's been super fun, David. Thank you for having me. Boy, I got to say, Gail is such a creative force. Having her really makes you want to just go out and get moving on big ideas. And I love how she looks at creativity. It's not just about having a big idea. You've got to pair it with conviction so that that idea finds the traction and the budget it needs to become a reality. You've got to build a culture where others feel comfortable sharing big ideas too. They don't always have to just come from you. And you've got to have the courage to fight for big ideas because so often that 's what turns into the best work of your career. So let me ask you what big idea do you need to get people on board with this week? So let's take a page from Gail's playbook and try the triangle exercise that she mentioned in our conversation. She draws a triangle. She comes up with the three most important points that need to be heard along with something to support each point and then she repeats those three things multiple times. It's a simple exercise, but boy, it's a powerful way you can start putting some conviction behind the ideas you want to turn into reality. So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is that great leaders fight for big ideas. Coming up next week on how leaders lead is Edward Lee, celebrity chef, author and restaurateur. Since people feel like they're just a number or just a worker or just a product , they lose the passion. And so while we are here in the restaurant, I try and make life easy for them and fun. So be sure to come back again next week to hear our entire conversation. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of How leaders lead where every Thursday you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I make it a point to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business so that you will become the best leader you can be. [BLANK_AUDIO] [ Silence ]