Zucker, Pelosi Take Center Stage at NBCU Confab

After posing a throwaway query about her outfit, Jeff Zucker on Tuesday morning asked Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi the $64,000 question, one that as of four days ago no longer bears any relevance to his own professional life. In an interview leading off NBC Universal’s “Power of the Purse” breakfast, the lame duck chief executive of the media conglomerate asked Pelosi if she thought she might retain her position as the presiding officer of the US House of Representatives following the midterm elections. Pelosi, who spoke in a somewhat discursive manner throughout the dialog, said she “fully expects to be Speaker of the House five weeks from now.” Speaking to a crowd of approximately 500 media industry professionals at Cipriani’s on 42nd St., Pelosi gave an abridged stump speech of sorts, saying that people must choose between “a return to the failed policies of before” or stay the course with the Democratic Party. “We are making it in America; that’s a big part of our agenda,” Pelosi said. “The people are the boss and it remains for them to speak, but I have great confidence in our candidates.” After Comcast last week gave Zucker what amounts to a vote of no confidence, it would have been understandable for the 45-year-old NBCU chief to bow out of the morning’s event, which set the table for day two of Advertising Week. But Zucker is nothing if not a good soldier; as he told his employees last Friday, he would continue to carry out his duties until Comcast’s acquisition of NBCU is complete. Only one of Zucker’s handful of questions for Pelosi was specifically tailored for the audience, and the Speaker’s response was clear-cut. Having been asked if she believes whether marketers often fail to connect with the women they’re trying to reach, Pelosi replied, “It behooves advertisers to address women. The power of the purse is so self-evident that I would hope the opportunity is not lost.” She went on to add that marketers “had better get going with the communication, because that’s where the [purchasing] decisions are being made.” While Pelosi teased Zucker about his age (he is 25 years Pelosi’s junior) there were a few moments where the conversation got a little prickly. The Speaker seemed a bit put off by a query about the role fashion plays in a woman’s success––“Do you spend a lot of time thinking about this? Do men get asked these questions?” she fired back, to a chorus of cheers––and she dismissed an earlier question about the color of her pantsuit (a lively, if not to say Republican, shade of red) by saying, “it was what was clean.” Following the Pelosi-Zucker exchange, a panel of marketing executives and media buyers engaged in a brief conversation about the challenges of reaching women in a protean consumer culture. Much of the discussion touched on the impact the economic downturn has had on American spending habits––in a preamble to the event, Lauren Zalaznick, president of NBCU’s Women & Lifestyle Entertainment Networks, characterized the 2007-09 collapse as a “mancession,” given the disproportionate number of men who’ve been displaced from the workplace––and in many cases, the tone was somewhat downbeat. “None of us are living the life we thought we would be living,” offered Paley Center president and CEO Pat Mitchell, who served as the moderator. That assertion was reinforced by Barnard College president Debora Spar, who noted that today’s young woman no longer believed she could “have it all.” This was a matter of generational perspective, Spar added. “They have watched their mothers try to have it all and fail, so they’re much more thoughtful about how to proceed.” Another point made by Spar set off a discussion about how younger women have come of age in an era of unlimited entertainment options, which has had a destabilizing effect on marketing efforts. “The class of 2011 was born in 1989,” Spar said. “They have never known a world without the Internet. They are fundamentally addicted to choice.” As such, marketers can no longer devote the entirety of their media spend to carpetbombing the target with their messaging. “We have to train ourselves to learn about her mindset and where she’s receiving her content,” said Donna Speciale, president for investment and activation at the MediaVest. “When she’s at the gym at 5:00 a.m., she has a very different mindset than when she’s on the train reading her iPad. And that has a demonstrable effect on how receptive she’ll be to your message.” Speciale added that agencies and clients must evolve in real-time if the consumer pitch is to remain relevant. “What works today may not work six months from now,” she said. “Your models may not necessarily hold up, because everything changes so quickly. … It’s not that there’s a wrong answer; the key is to embrace fluidity.” Tina Brown, former editor of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair and founder of The Daily Beast, brought the conversation down to a more prosaic level. “Persuasion is about seduction,” Brown said. “They have so much going on that if you want them to pay attention you have to seduce them where they live. As such, creativity has never been more important.”Brown noted that the democratization of the media may be unavoidable in an age of Facebook and Twitter, but she added that there would always be a need for professional content generators and curators: editors, photographers, writers and graphic designers.“They say the crowd knows best. The trouble with that is, a lot of garbage gets dredged up from the bottom,” she said. As for the matter of achieving gender parity in the workplace, Brown was similarly blunt in her assessment. “Women need to seize the asylum. Waiting for a male to advance one’s career is not a strategy. The only answer is to start your own company and do the hiring yourself.”

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Zucker, Pelosi Take Center Stage at NBCU Confab

Anthony Crupi

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Anthony Crupi