Adweek
Media All-Stars 2009
Our annual survey of the best and brightest, featuring UM's Matt Seiler, executive of the year
Nov 16, 2009
by Steve McClellan
Both personally and professionally, Universal McCann worldwide CEO Matt Seiler has mastered the art of the extreme makeover.
On the home front, over the past dozen years, Seiler and his family have bought, lived in, renovated and resold four homes. "I love taking a house that isn't what it could be and help make it to become that...With God's will and our contractor's wallet," he quips. The latest home redesign will wrap up in a matter of weeks.
Clearly a man who deals with building contractors on a regular basis thrives on chaos. But Seiler sees himself more as someone who heartily embraces change: "I love change. A lot of people hate it. But I hate it when things are the way they are. I get bored too quickly."
Seiler's relatively brief but intense career in the media agency business bears out his philosophy. He has advanced by exceeding client expectations and successfully implementing agency redesigns, all the while navigating the constantly shifting media landscape. In the past five years, he's run two holding company media agencies -- Omnicom's PHD and more recently Interpublic Group's larger UM, where he assumed his current post in September 2008.
In both cases, he's refined the offerings, improved the new business track record and boosted revenue -- considerably. This year alone, UM has raked in $650 million in new business, including BMW ($200 million), Applebee's ($155 million), Charles Schwab ($100 million) and Dyson ($40 million), and retained key client Nationwide ($210 million) after a review.
For the results he's delivered for UM in less than two years, Matt Seiler is our pick for Media All-Stars Executive of the Year.
He also generated serious results while at PHD USA, which Seiler joined as president in September 2004. He honed the shop's offering with the development of a robust communications planning capability and reorganized around what he called the lead agent system, which put one senior executive in charge of each major account who could then tap various specialists at the agency in order to service client needs. The upshot: more than $1 billion in net new business and an almost 30 percent revenue jump (to $300 million) in his first two years on the job. For his efforts he was elevated to North American CEO in the spring of 2007.
Meanwhile, as Seiler set about retooling PHD, UM was facing its own serious challenges. The low point, perhaps, was 2005 when the shop lost close to $1 billion in accounts, including Lowe's ($315 million) and a portion of the General Motors buying business ($600 million).
When Nick Brien joined the shop as worldwide CEO late in 2005 (replacing Robin Kent, who was ousted earlier that year), he spent a lot of time putting out fires on major accounts, including Microsoft and Sony, which had become dissatisfied. In 2006, the agency effectively declared a moratorium on new business efforts as it sought to shore up its offering and make sure existing clients were being serviced to their satisfaction.
In 2007, near disaster struck when Johnson & Johnson put its $3 billion global media account in review. UM was the incumbent on the lion's share of the U.S. business and spent most of the year defending it (successfully) and putting in place the extra resources it had promised to retain the account going forward.
When Brien was elevated to CEO at Mediabrands in July last year, he hired Seiler for the global UM CEO role.
Brien relates that he was impressed with Seiler's work at PHD to "build a business with a very distinctive proposition." Beyond that, Seiler has a "breadth of experience" that also spans senior level positions at several creative shops (including BBDO New York), coupled with personal traits such as curiosity, drive, optimism and "a fearlessness to take risks" that are necessary today for global CEOs. Seiler, he says, has a "rare combination" of talents. "He is a visionary who can execute, and clients are stimulated by that."
Seiler is the first to acknowledge that his predecessor (and boss) Brien and the IPG financial team laid a solid foundation for his most recent agency remodeling efforts.
"IPG cleaned up their act squeaky clean," he explains, referring to the separate P&L that was set up to separate UM from McCann World Group a few years back. "Nick stabilized the big clients, and I came into a really healthy opportunity."
The first thing he set out to do was to create a new positioning statement for the agency that let the outside world know "who we are and what we stand for," recalls Seiler. Before he joined the agency, he was asked what his impression of it was. "My response was I didn't have any impression of UM," he bluntly declared. As a way of communicating the shop's worldview to outsiders, Seiler came up with the positioning statement "Curious Minds for Surprising Results."
And clients like it. "It's really true of them," says Steve Petitpas, general manager for Microsoft's global marketing communications group. "I do think Matt is transforming UM into an agency that is grounded in curiosity and intelligence about customers and how they interact with media."
Earlier this year, Seiler put his new management team in place -- a combination of new and existing managers at the agency, which has estimated worldwide billings of $15 billion. In some cases UM veterans took on new roles. Case in point: Scott Tegethoff, an account executive who is now chief marketing officer but who still oversees the global Coca-Cola account.
"Sometimes you have to redeploy people in order to stimulate them," says Seiler. "Here's a guy that is so creative and energetic and passionate about the brand, and we hadn't used him for that. So we moved him into the CMO role, and he's terrific."
In May, Seiler hired Jacki Kelley from the vendor side -- she had run the sales operation for Martha Stewart Omnimedia -- to run UM U.S. as president.
And while some in the industry didn't completely get the hire at the time because Kelley lacks agency experience, Seiler counters that her experience makes great sense given his "deep interest in connecting with media owners in a way that nobody else has." And he made a similar move in Europe for the same reason, hiring Jim Hytner, the former ITV and BskyB executive, to oversee UM's Europe/Middle East/Africa region.
Petitpas applauds Seiler's decision to bring in new people from outside the media agency world -- to him, Kelley is a "great hire." The shop has "a lot of people that we can get into the really good discussions" that run the gamut of strategic marketing and communications. While Microsoft may have been dissatisfied a few years back, that's clearly no longer the case. "UM is a very important relationship, and I'm a genuinely happy client with Matt," he adds.
Those words clearly constitute a client view Seiler hopes doesn't change.
Clients: Sony, Microsoft, BMW, Charles Schwab, Nationwide, Applebee's
Years in Biz: On the media agency side: 5; in advertising: 25 years
Signature Achievement: Landing or defending $850 million in business for UM
What the Boss Says: Nick Brien says Seiler possesses "a fearlessness to take risks" and calls him "a visionary who can execute, and clients are stimulated by that.
