Latest / Chief Officer / Mark Miller, Chief Officer at Team One: Build What Outlasts You

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Mark Miller, Chief Officer at Team One: Build What Outlasts You · Chief Officer

• 0:00
  Hi Mark, it's such a pleasure to see you. Thank you so much
• 0:04
  for joining us on Chief Officer. Thanks for having me
• 0:09
  Tiffany, nice to see you. It's a huge pleasure as you know
• 0:14
  and the listeners should know, Mark and I go way back in over
• 0:19
  a decade and it's such a pleasure because
• 0:22
  Mark is just an incredible leader and friend and someone who's been so
• 0:27
  supportive and a champion of others, including myself. So to be able to
• 0:31
  spotlight him today and his career and his incredible journey and
• 0:35
  inspiring leadership is a real honor. So I'm delighted to have you and
• 0:39
  to be able to share with our listeners all that you've done and how you
• 0:43
  got to where you are today. It's awesome.
• 0:46
  Really excited to be here. It's early. We're recording this when I'm in
• 0:49
  Los Angeles and it's a little bit after seven in the morning and there
• 0:53
  are a few things that would bring me in to do that and this is
• 0:56
  definitely one of them. So thank you, Tiffany.
• 0:58
  - Absolutely. Also, Mark, I'm excited for you to be able to share
• 1:03
  with everyone where you are today as chief officer at Team One,
• 1:08
  under Publicis, excited for you to be able to share your journey
• 1:13
  and where you grew up the years before. And then we'll dive in into
• 1:18
  the role itself and how you got there. - Fantastic.
• 1:21
  You want to start at the start? Exactly, yes. All right. If it
• 1:26
  sounds like I have a Canadian accent, do not be fooled. It's
• 1:31
  only because I'm originally from Toronto, Canada, and that's
• 1:35
  where my story begins. And I have what for some people is a less
• 1:40
  usual story. And it's because maybe I didn't know where my
• 1:45
  career would...
• 1:46
  end or evolve to so early on. But I had actually figured out the start
• 1:51
  of my career quite early and it was happenstance. I was taking a course
• 1:56
  in high school and the premise of the course was that we were allowed to
• 2:01
  work at a company or an industry that we thought we'd be interested in.
• 2:05
  We were responsible for securing our own employment. But if you
• 2:10
  could find the job,
• 2:11
  You could work for a semester and get credit for doing it and learn
• 2:16
  something about a skill or an occupation that you thought you might be
• 2:21
  great at. So because I grew up in Toronto, Canada, there were very few
• 2:25
  things that we were sort of famous or known for. One of them was comedy
• 2:30
  and comedy writing. And for that reason, growing up as
• 2:34
  as a young kid, I thought I might be interested in being a comedy writer
• 2:38
  and I called a place called Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. I guess a through line
• 2:43
  for me, like for many people's I've had role models in my life and early
• 2:47
  on, it was people working in comedy and comedy writing. So I called a
• 2:51
  place called The Second City. They were most famous for their group in
• 2:56
  Chicago.
• 2:56
  But they actually had a pretty big and well-established group in
• 3:00
  Toronto. And a number of people who came from there went on to work at
• 3:05
  Saturday Night Live. And that was a big deal to me as a kid growing up.
• 3:09
  So I thought this was the greatest thing ever. I called them and I
• 3:14
  explained I was a high school student. We had the opportunity to go work
• 3:18
  for credit, and they talked to me. And they kind of had a--
• 3:22
  Metaphorically, a smile on their voice, which is probably to say that
• 3:26
  they were laughing in a polite way, but they said, "Yeah, sure. Why
• 3:31
  don't you come down?" And it went like this. They got to the end of the
• 3:36
  interview, or what was sort of an interview, and they said,
• 3:39
  You know, when you called us and said that you want to take this, we did
• 3:44
  think it was really funny that a high school student wanted to do it.
• 3:48
  We've never had a high school student call and say they would do it for
• 3:52
  credit before. We were just curious to meet you and figure out what this
• 3:56
  was all about. Wow. They said the thing is, as fun as you think this
• 4:00
  might be, the people who work in the industry take it really seriously.
• 4:04
  And they wouldn't actually think it was fun or interesting to have a
• 4:08
  high school student who was doing this for fun and for credit to work
• 4:11
  alongside of them because this was their livelihood. And they said, "But
• 4:15
  we really like you." And they said, "We're surprised. We just thought
• 4:18
  this would be fun or funny, but as it turns out, you want to work here
• 4:22
  and we really like you." And they said, "What do you think you want to
• 4:25
  do for a living?" And I said, "Well, I think I either maybe want to..."
• 4:29
  be a comedy writer or I've seen filmmakers come from Canada and use the
• 4:33
  writing to make film, maybe be a filmmaker or I thought maybe about
• 4:37
  working in advertising and they said, you should do that. And they said,
• 4:42
  here's the thing. We have an agency, they're a small Canadian national.
• 4:46
  We're going to call them on your behalf and see if we can help get you
• 4:51
  an internship there. And they did. They called it.
• 4:54
  They'd never had same scenario. They never had a high school student
• 4:58
  work with them before. They thought it was fond or funny. They let me
• 5:03
  do it. I worked as a copywriter. I had the best time. I had wonderful
• 5:08
  mentors. They were selling my writing. Clients were buying the writing.
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  And they'd asked if I wanted to not return to high school and stay on
• 5:18
  full-time.
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  and work in the industry as a copywriter. And the funny thing, of
• 5:23
  course, is in my family, I'm the youngest of three, family was working
• 5:27
  class. It was very important to my mom and dad that their kids all had
• 5:32
  a good education. Not finishing high school wasn't an option. Going on
• 5:36
  to college or university was a priority.
• 5:39
  And so I did, I went to university, I went to business school,
• 5:43
  studied marketing, consumer behavior, marketing research, and the
• 5:48
  same place that hired me when I was in high school, gave me my first
• 5:53
  full-time job after I graduated from business school. - Oh, wow,
• 5:57
  amazing, wow. - I knew early on that advertising could be a career
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  for me. And it took, (static)
• 6:04
  finding sort of the right people and working myself into the right place
• 6:09
  and putting in the work at school to advance it. But I found people who
• 6:13
  encouraged and nurtured my passion from very early on. So I knew the
• 6:18
  career choice pretty early. Yeah. And I can see why you would pinpoint
• 6:22
  it and you would go with the flow of what they suggested early on since
• 6:27
  advertising does so beautifully combined all the elements that you're so
• 6:31
  talented at with humor and art and creative and filmmaking and all of
• 6:35
  that combined into one. And so where did that take you after when you
• 6:39
  when you joined their agency that you work your way up or what happened
• 6:44
  then? Yeah, it started it was really interesting most of my peers at
• 6:48
  school was very
• 6:49
  It was intentional. The school that I went to actually had a nice
• 6:53
  relationship with a large ad community. So it was very plausible that
• 6:57
  upon graduation that I could go to a large global company. But I loved
• 7:01
  that I knew these folks from when I started in high school. And what
• 7:05
  they had offered was a bit unusual. They said because of their size and
• 7:09
  scale.
• 7:09
  that if I wanted to come and write ads there, they knew that I had skill
• 7:14
  and fluency and they encouraged that. But they were also aware that I
• 7:18
  spent years learning more rigorous disciplines, consumer research. They
• 7:22
  said, we're small enough that versus a large agency where you would have
• 7:26
  to go down a track, you can kind of come here and explore all of that.
• 7:31
  And so I did, I started with the small Canadian national.
• 7:34
  I knew my passion and interest and I started putting my skill to use and
• 7:39
  I had good mentors and people who encouraged me. And then what I found
• 7:43
  was just other role models, I think as many of us do as we go along that
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  I see other people doing other things and kind of learning from them and
• 7:53
  possibilities were opening up.
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  I began to feel that my career would have a long tail. I wasn't
• 7:58
  interested in just the next job, but I wasn't interested in just the
• 8:02
  next title. I knew that I wanted to do something that was meaningful in
• 8:06
  the industry and I started to seek out and find other people who were
• 8:10
  doing it. So my next move was to go from a small Canadian national to a
• 8:14
  large global company, though still based in Toronto at the time.
• 8:18
  And it was true, they required not experimentation across disciplines.
• 8:22
  They said, we know you have a creative side and we know you have a
• 8:26
  research side. And at the time in a large organization, they wanted to
• 8:31
  know where the specialty would lie. So I went down more of the business,
• 8:35
  the research and the strategy track.
• 8:38
  And that too began to open up possibilities for me. I then had the
• 8:42
  opportunity to move from my role in Toronto, Canada to being recruited
• 8:47
  by a company in Los Angeles. And because I grew up in the extreme, maybe
• 8:52
  not extreme, I grew up in very cold weather. There was something very
• 8:57
  delightful about being not in the cold weather or your health.
• 9:01
  came to LA and I began as a senior strategist out here and quickly
• 9:06
  moved into a director role. And sort of like my path to this
• 9:11
  point, I was exposed to really good mentors and people who were
• 9:15
  doing interesting things. - Where was the senior strategist role?
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  Was it here?
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  The first role was a place called Rubin Postaer and
• 9:26
  Associates, which at the time was based in Santa Monica on
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  Third Street, and the strategist sat overlooking the
• 9:35
  promenade. So I went from a formal office building in
• 9:39
  Toronto with a view of the snow.
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  to a lovely space overseeing the promenade with wonderful weather and
• 9:47
  a very different sort of vibe and energy. It was a wonderful
• 9:51
  opportunity. It was primarily a research department that was converted
• 9:56
  into a strategy department. It was using all my skill and fluency. It
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  was the chance to experience something different, but most importantly,
• 10:06
  it exposed me to some people who were doing a different kind of work. So
• 10:11
  I had all the functional skills to participate, but the range of
• 10:15
  output was very different than what I was doing from where I came from.
• 10:20
  And it wasn't a deterrent. It was actually, I would say it sort of
• 10:24
  unboxed and unleashed something in me, which is from close proximity.
• 10:29
  I saw amazing people doing some really interesting things that allowed
• 10:34
  me to believe that my career could go to places far beyond where I had
• 10:39
  been. And that really motivated something in me. It brought out the best
• 10:44
  of my skills. It showed me how to have not only good ideas, but to
• 10:48
  persuade people of why they were good ideas. Over time, I learned how
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  to--
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  inspire that in other people as well. And after a short amount of time,
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  I moved to my current agency, a place called Team One. And the lovely
• 11:02
  thing about the practice of strategic planning here is in a world where
• 11:06
  companies want a silo of business thinkers or creative thinkers, Team
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  One desired and required that rigorous business thinking, analytical
• 11:15
  thinking and strategic thinking would drive creative thinking.
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  And so, you know, it's a full circle moment for me. I began as a
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  high school student wanting to be a writer. I developed all these
• 11:28
  skills in the areas of research and analytics, very rigorous sort
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  of discipline thinking. And here I was being given the opportunity
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  to say you can apply all those skills in one agency. I love that. I
• 11:43
  love that. And
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  When you joined Team One, what was that moment like? And was it then
• 11:49
  that you joined as a chief officer, chief strategy officer? Or was it
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  ultimately at a later time that you became the chief officer? There was
• 11:58
  evolution here as well. So let's see. When I moved to see when I first
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  came to Rubin Postaer in LA.
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  I started as a senior strategist and pretty quickly became a
• 12:09
  director. When I came to Team One, I was a director and within a
• 12:13
  reasonable amount of time, I became an executive director. Two things
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  happened here. One is, not just that I ran into, I was very fortunate to
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  have another excellent mentor in the CSO role. Very good with the
• 12:28
  academics and the foundations.
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  very good at inspiring each of us to achieve something exceptional
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  within us, to develop our own wonderful ideas, and really good at
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  working with talent and encouraging us to work with talent as well. So I
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  had really good proximity to someone who was exceptional in the role.
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  And within a short amount of time, not uncommon in advertising that.
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  person went to work at another agency, it opened up a CSO role. They
• 12:58
  did not give that to me at first. They brought in another CSO. A
• 13:02
  friend of mine, someone I trusted and respected, admired. And so I was
• 13:07
  very fortunate again, because I went from a CSO who I trusted and
• 13:12
  respected to another one.
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  And then when that person ended up leaving, also it wasn't that long
• 13:19
  a period of time, they also did not immediately give me the CSO
• 13:23
  role. There was a sense that the work was quite, if I remember
• 13:28
  correctly, there was respect and regard for the work that I'd
• 13:32
  contributed.
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  But of course, being a CSO is more than just being exceptional at your
• 13:37
  craft. There's the ability to inspire and move people and lead an
• 13:41
  organization forward. And so there was a bit of a wearing-in or a trial
• 13:45
  process. So as an executive leader of the department, I was sort of
• 13:49
  forced into a situation. I picked up somebody else's work.
• 13:52
  and was given the opportunity of necessity to show that I could shine in
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  an important moment. We were working on a new business pitch. I was the
• 14:02
  next most senior person who could lead that pitch. I helped to do it. We
• 14:07
  won. And the outcome of that was eventually my role was elevated to a
• 14:11
  CSO. So I really had to work at it and earn it, but I was with people
• 14:16
  who supported me in that endeavor.
• 14:18
  I love that. I love that. And that's amazing. Are you able
• 14:23
  to share the client that you won or is that confidential?
• 14:27
  When the camera goes off, I will tell you exactly. Okay,
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  perfect. Perfect. And so that's so exciting. So was it Team
• 14:37
  One leadership that then gave you the call and told you that
• 14:42
  you were now selected as
• 14:44
  Chief Strategy Officer or was it Publicis leadership or how did it work
• 14:48
  when you got the call? So Team One is a part of Publicis which is a very
• 14:53
  large global communications organization. Team One is an agency of about
• 14:58
  400 some odd people within that organization and the balance of us not
• 15:03
  exclusively but the the biggest hub is in LA we have offices in Dallas,
• 15:07
  New York, Chicago, Boise
• 15:08
  Atlanta, our CEO or the equivalent of our CEO at Team One was the
• 15:13
  person who gave me the opportunity to move into that role. I think you
• 15:18
  asked me a very short and simple question and I found a way to
• 15:22
  integrate all our various offices and answer your question. - That's
• 15:27
  why you're chief strategy officer, I love it. And so I'm guessing this
• 15:32
  is Julie.
• 15:32
  So she it was actually someone by the name of Brian who was before
• 15:37
  Julie. Julie, who was our current CEO, who's another role model and
• 15:41
  mentor for me. Julie's been here of similar duration to me, actually a
• 15:45
  little bit longer than me. And Julie and I have had the opportunity to
• 15:50
  not only support one another in moving through the organization.
• 15:54
  We've also had the chance to see one another grow up in this
• 15:58
  organization, which is a pretty cool thing. Absolutely. You're giving me
• 16:02
  chills as you say that. It's really beautiful. You two have been there
• 16:06
  for over two decades or so, right? Well, I don't want to count decades,
• 16:10
  but we've been here for a while. Amazing. It's amazing. And so who was
• 16:15
  the first person you told when you got the...
• 16:17
  Chief Strategy Officer after so many times over waiting and working hard
• 16:22
  and finally earning it and deserving it feeling like you've earned it.
• 16:27
  Yeah, my mom and my dad, my parents sacrificed quite a bit for my
• 16:31
  brother, sister and me.
• 16:33
  I think like a lot of kids growing up, we probably don't appreciate all
• 16:37
  the things that our parents do for us, but they really took what they
• 16:41
  had and invested in the family, invested in our education. And not just
• 16:45
  when it was convenient to do, but even at the hardest of times. When I
• 16:50
  had the opportunity to come to the United States, my mom was going
• 16:54
  through some rather severe health realities.
• 16:56
  Instead of encouraging me to stay behind, they really motivated me to
• 17:00
  pursue something that was important to me. Whether it was when I was in
• 17:05
  high school and thought I wanted to be a writer, whether it was coming
• 17:09
  out of school and starting at a smaller Canadian national, whether it
• 17:13
  was moving to LA, my parents have always been supportive. I will say
• 17:17
  there was one moment in time.
• 17:19
  when my mom and dad had called me, had called me aside. And it was when
• 17:23
  I was going from high school to university and they asked what I thought
• 17:28
  I wanted to study. And I said, I was choosing between something either
• 17:33
  creative, because I always enjoyed creativity or something business
• 17:37
  oriented. And they said, I should do whatever I want to do as long as
• 17:41
  what I want to do was go to business school.
• 17:44
  It was the one time where they were very specific about their
• 17:49
  motivation. Anyway, they've always been there for me. They were the
• 17:54
  first people that I called and shared that with. I love that. And
• 17:59
  they must be so proud. And so what was your first week like? How
• 18:03
  did it feel? And how did it change?
• 18:06
  that first week when you were elevated to the chief officer role? Well,
• 18:11
  there are a number of things that are visible to outsiders in terms of
• 18:16
  what's involved with the role. So what happens in a meeting, I could see
• 18:21
  that. There's the output, the writing and the contributing, I could see
• 18:26
  that. There's the interacting with people and I could see it.
• 18:30
  But one of the things that was at arm's length to me was some of the
• 18:35
  operational things involved in the role. And so in my first week, I was
• 18:40
  being given documents that had to do with approving department budgets
• 18:45
  and department spending. And if you've never seen that before,
• 18:49
  It all seemed like it was a lot of real time learning. I would say my
• 18:53
  very first week on the job, I was called into our CFO's role office or
• 18:58
  CFO's office. And he smiled. I was I was easy game for him. He knew I
• 19:02
  was new in the role. And what he was trying to illustrate was people are
• 19:07
  asking you to approve some budgets, aren't they? And I said, yeah. And
• 19:11
  he said, well, I see that you have approved them. And I said,
• 19:15
  Yes, I have. And he said, he said, there are some rules involved in
• 19:19
  that. There was a lot of there was a lot of operational learning that
• 19:24
  happened in that first week and continues to happen even now many years
• 19:28
  later. I love that. And what's the proudest accomplishment for you
• 19:33
  looking back on your journey and your inspiring career? What was the
• 19:37
  first one that came to mind when I asked that?
• 19:40
  Yeah, there are two things even though I should make it one. So the
• 19:45
  one is organizations need to evolve and change over time. And so I was
• 19:50
  very clear in what I was inheriting when I came into this role. Team
• 19:55
  One has a long standing established relationship, particularly with an
• 20:00
  iconic client in the affluent space, the luxury affluent and premium
• 20:05
  space.
• 20:05
  We knew how to do that kind of work, at least until that point in time.
• 20:09
  But I was never really interested, as I said earlier, in just the next
• 20:14
  title or the next career moment. I really wanted longevity, and to do
• 20:18
  that required changing things and shaping things. And so the first thing
• 20:22
  I'm particularly proud of is over many years, not just myself, but
• 20:26
  myself in combination with my team.
• 20:28
  have contributed some thought leadership that's become core to the way
• 20:32
  the organization does business, not for a moment in time, but for years
• 20:36
  and hopefully for years to come. It's everything from a proprietary
• 20:40
  global research study called the Global Affluent Collective, which looks
• 20:44
  at what the world's wealthy share in common, to a speaker series about
• 20:48
  how entrepreneurs are changing and shaping the game called Moonshot.
• 20:52
  and we were very fortunate years ago you came in to speak at that so
• 20:56
  thank you for that. And then we've also been doing some work on a
• 21:00
  contribution called the Legacy Lab which reframes legacy as something
• 21:04
  that's forward looking not backward looking and all of these pieces
• 21:09
  hadn't existed before myself and my team over many years had taken on
• 21:13
  our roles.
• 21:14
  but they're building blocks we've put in place. I'm quite proud of the
• 21:18
  contributions, the body of work, but equally, if not more so, the range
• 21:22
  of people who've added to it. One of my favorite things, and it's always
• 21:27
  very hard when good people leave the team because it's not easy to
• 21:31
  replace exceptional people, but it's a moment of pride when some of
• 21:35
  those people have gone on to have senior roles at IDEO.
• 21:38
  and senior roles at Amazon and senior roles at Meta, are people are
• 21:43
  exhibiting the kind of talent that shows they have skill and ability
• 21:48
  within an ad agency environment, but far beyond it as well. So it's
• 21:52
  nice recognition for our team and those individuals to see that their
• 21:57
  skill is exceptional, not just in a small universe, but in a rather
• 22:02
  large universe.
• 22:03
  That's beautiful. And finally, my last question to you has been
• 22:08
  and will be always, what is the advice you would give to
• 22:12
  others, to myself, to other leaders who wish to be more
• 22:17
  like you, particularly leaders who are one step below the chief
• 22:22
  officer role? What would you advise them if they want to be the
• 22:27
  chief officer like you?
• 22:29
  The best advice I'd offer these days recognizing that this afternoon it
• 22:33
  might be different and tomorrow might be different as well. I heard one
• 22:37
  of your previous guests talk about being a student and that really
• 22:40
  resonates with me. I think that's important. The best advice I'd give at
• 22:44
  the moment is a little bit like there's an app called Waze that I think
• 22:48
  most people are familiar with. And I feel that for that app to work, you
• 22:52
  really only need to know two things.
• 22:54
  You need to know where you're starting and you need to know where you're
• 22:58
  going. With those two pieces of information, you can constantly route
• 23:02
  and reroute to get you there in the most efficient way. It doesn't
• 23:06
  matter if there's traffic jam, if there's bad weather, if something
• 23:10
  unforeseen happens. If you know where you're starting and where you're
• 23:15
  going, you'll find a way to get there. For me, I was fortunate because
• 23:19
  early on,
• 23:19
  I did know my starting place. Like I said, I took the course in high
• 23:24
  school. I knew I wanted to be in advertising. But where I set my end
• 23:29
  destination early on would have been something like I want to work at a
• 23:34
  larger organization. Eventually it became, it'd be nice to have the
• 23:38
  opportunity to work globally.
• 23:40
  Over time, it became, I'd like to have the authority and responsibility
• 23:45
  and the opportunity to succeed as a CSO. And over time, it grows beyond
• 23:50
  that. I think the more we're clear on where we are today, and the
• 23:54
  furthest out or as far out as we can dream and imagine, if you keep
• 23:59
  sort of focused on those two things, I think you'll find that you can
• 24:04
  get (static)
• 24:05
  from A to B in the most effective and interesting way. And yeah,
• 24:09
  sometimes you have to reroute, sometimes it's not always a straight
• 24:13
  line, but that doesn't mean you have to deviate from getting to what's
• 24:17
  important to you. And I think sometimes people get too easily distracted
• 24:21
  from things that are less important. And you look back after three or
• 24:25
  four or five years and say, I was busy, I put in hard work.
• 24:29
  But because I was less clear on where I was going in the end, I'm not
• 24:33
  sure I spent that time as effectively as I would have liked. So I guess
• 24:38
  I would say be a little bit more like Waze. Strategic and flexible.
• 24:43
  I love it. Thank you so much. So beautifully said and your journey
• 24:47
  has been so exemplary and exemplifying that final piece of advice. So
• 24:52
  inspiring to be spending time with you and such an honor.
• 24:57
  Thank you, Tiffany.