Q&A: Hearts & Science COO on Building Company Culture in the #MeToo Era and the Threat of Consultancies

The shop has expanded to six U.S. locations and 18 global offices from Chile to (soon-to-be) China and Germany to Australia. COO Kathleen Brookbanks said the company is currently competing in three reviews, chasing Macy’s U.S. business as well as two unnamed global reviews.

The rapid expansion led to a whirlwind time trying to find the right talent. “In the first year we had so many resumes that we didn’t know what to do,” Brookbanks said. “We had so many resumes that in the beginning we were afraid that people at other agencies were sending people to find out the story about us while we were consciously trying to keep our story quiet.”

Brookbanks sat down with Adweek at the 4A’s Accelerate conference in Miami this week to discuss the biggest issues shaping the advertising industry, including the #MeToo movement, brand safety, the rise of consultancies, and media transparency. (The interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.)

Adweek: What’s the latest from Hearts & Science? After winning P&G and AT&T, what’s next?
Kathleen Brookbanks: We are moving into our second phase, which is thought leadership. We’ve been able to get all the data platforms and technology platforms that were important to us to be a differentiator truly up and running and making an impact on different clients’ businesses.

In terms of the culture at Hearts & Science, being relatively new, you have the advantage of stopping the toxic culture brought to light during the #MeToo movement. How did the agency make sure it started off on the right foot?
It’s been great to be a new agency because at the outset you don’t have any of the bad behavior. You can make a conscious decision about what you want the culture to be. You have to have a very consistent, open dialogue about it.

What we’ve done is not only have an HR group, we have a chief experience officer, and she’s a part of our board. She has the role specifically of developing culture and what we want to stand for. When we have behavior that is not aligned with our culture, we act on it very quickly, and that sends the message to other people that if [they] signed up for this culture, that it’s actually real. It’s not how we behave.

What advice would you give legacy companies dealing with these problems?
Leadership needs to stand up and say it’s a new day. You can’t just say it, you need to live it from the top down. It takes a degree of courage that is difficult. You have people running big accounts that aren’t good for the company but good for that relationship. In terms of short-term revenue, you may not want to deal with that person [who is behaving badly]. But if you don’t deal with those people, people start to notice.

Having someone own the client relationship is dangerous for agencies. When someone comes in at a high level and they own the relationship, the agency is very happy about that, but you have to remember who you work for. People start giving the client what they want, but that doesn’t always align with what the agency stands for.

How is your agency dealing with the latest brand safety issues with YouTube and Facebook?
Hearts & Science took the most aggressive stance on YouTube and recommended clients pull 100 percent of spend, and they all did it with urgency. We did our first in-house test looking for our clients’ advertising to see where it really was, and we had a fail rate of like 40 percent relative to the content guidelines. It was the frightening kind of content like terrorism. Subsequent research showed 25 percent of people who viewed our clients’ content next to that inappropriate content gave them a negative perspective on the business, and coming out of a negative is a very difficult thing to do.

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