Trumpet of the swan - Ogilvy & Mather Chairman and CEO Rochelle Lazarus

Chief Executive, The, June, 1997 by Bernice Kanner

In 1994, IBM stunned the marketing world by consolidating its $500 million advertising account, parceled among 40 agencies, into just one. It was the largest account switch ever and at its center was Shelley Lazarus, then the president and COO of WPP Group's Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide.

Named chief executive last fall, on April 30 Lazarus inherited the chairman's baton from Charlotte Beers, the 61-year-old dynamic Texan who became the first female chief executive in O&M's history in 1992. Heading the $7.6 billion agency that legendary adman David Ogilvy founded in 1948, whose clients include Duracell, Ford, Kimberly Clark, Shell Oil, Jaguar, Sears Roebuck, Eastman Kodak, and American Express, makes Lazarus the most powerful woman in advertising - not bad for someone who couldn't find work 25 years ago.

"Other agencies wouldn't hire me, claiming they didn't want to alienate the wives of account executives with whom I'd have to work late," Lazarus recalls. But O&M took her on in 1971 as an assistant and a few years later - when she was six months pregnant - named her its first female account executive. With the exception of a hiatus in 1974 to follow her husband on a two-year posting at a Dayton, OH, Air Force base and care for their newborn, she has spent virtually her entire career at O&M. On returning to New York, she rejoined the firm and was soon running O&M Direct, the unit responsible for "junk mail." Considered "off-the-path" at the time, Lazarus found direct marketing "a specialty with enormous profit potential," and parlayed the job into a launch pad for posts as president of the New York office and president of Ogilvy North America.

As a female executive, she thinks too much is made of her gender. "Women have to earn power but now the door is open. "I'm proof the glass ceiling is history. Of 275 people in my class at Columbia Business School, four were women, but within five years several of my women clients will be running their companies. We're at the point where being a woman doesn't help or hurt; it makes no difference."

Yet, according to a 1995 Gumbinner/Haubenstock survey, while women accounted for 56 percent of the industry's work force, just 17 percent of ad executives earning more than $200,000 were female.

At O&M, 63 of 162 senior partners are women, although Lazarus says parenthood doesn't win anyone special treatment. "Department heads can't work part time," she insists. "Just because you're a mom doesn't mean we can lower performance standards."

Unlike Beers, who flaunted her femininity - once mesmerizing a Sears boardroom by assembling a complex drill bit with long, scarlet nails - Lazarus's image is conservative. She calls herself "the good soldier who followed the rules." Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP Group, which bought O&M in a hostile takeover in 1989, describes her as "quieter and more measured" than Beers. "She's understated, diligent, and a lot less flamboyant, but she gets the job done."

"She is the best client-handling professional O&M has got," adds Mike Walsh, CEO of O&M Europe. It was Lazarus who smoothed the waters when Hershey executives were irked by O&M's pursuit of Mars, by making sure "they knew we were just interested in pet food outside the U.S."

Wresting American Express back from Chiat/Day just 11 months after O&M was fired in 1991 was a crowning achievment, as was successfully luring back other key lost clients, including Maxwell House, Unilever, and Shell Oil. Forging ties with IBM's Louis V. Gerstner and Abby Kohnstamm while they were at Amex, Lazarus also engineered the secretive wooing that brought in IBM, after which she unceremoniously dispatched less profitable conflicts, including Microsoft and Compaq, and "grew" the account to more than $700 million. In February, she helped lasso GTE Corp.'s estimated $100 million ad account, forfeiting Nynex and Pacific Telesis Group.

Such loyalty has a price. A year ago, O&M resigned Campbell's $15 million Pepperidge Farm account, a 40-year client, to take more Unilever business. "Unilever's our third-largest account in 58 countries," explains Lazarus, "We handled Campbell in eight. Campbell told us to choose. It's hard to be loyal to everybody."

Now she's strengthening ties with Amex, for which O&M created the "Don't leave home without it" campaign and celebrity spots with Jerry Seinfeld. A year ago Amex unexpectedly assigned a project to rival Young & Rubicam. "They're trying to keep us on our toes," Lazarus says, "but we're going to keep doing good work and try to bring that back too."

Lazarus's goals at O&M, which currently has 272 offices, are to strengthen global brands, such as Duracell, Ford, and Eastman Kodak, and to develop O&M in Asia and Latin America. Recently, O&M set up a combined media department with J. Walter Thompson, also owned by WPP, to service Eastman Kodak, an account they share.

Describing her strength as "problem solving," Lazarus says that balancing work and children has brought her perspective. "A work disappointment is not the end of the world. I've been told that successful working mothers have to be comfortable with failure because they always feel they're failing at something. Someone once described me as a swan. I look smooth going across the lake but underneath I'm paddling like crazy."