Dynamic Duos: Dentsu’s Angela Johnson talks smart strategy and hard career choices with Subway’s Shannon Stowers

We often hear from agencies and brand leaders who are seeking marketing insights on what’s hot versus what’s not. But what if we could listen in on an unguarded conversation between agency leaders and their clients? What if we could better understand the dynamic of this important relationship, one that’s fundamental to how campaigns roll out? That’s why The Current is launching a new series called Dynamic Duos, in which we eavesdrop on these candid conversations.

We’re kicking off the series with Angela Johnson, global client president at Dentsu, and Shannon Stowers, VP of marketing at Subway restaurants. The two have had a close working relationship for years, and in this conversation they talk about unplanned pivots in their careers, the importance of thinking about the “why” behind their decisions, and the balance of marketing as both a science and an art.

Angela Johnson: Looking back over your career, you’ve had several different chapters. You’ve been client side, agency side, you’ve run insights, you’ve run media, you’ve run social. Were they planned pivots or did you just flow where life took you, and how much did you think about planning out your career in the marketing world?

Shannon Stowers: Yes, I definitely agree that I’ve kind of had a unique path with several different chapters. I spent a number of years in the agency and loved it. I always wanted to go client-side. And there’s pros and cons to each, but for me it wasn’t really a plan. I guess you could say it was more driving by compass than GPS.

Regardless of which of those two paths you want to go, I would say probably the best advice I could give to anyone at any stage in your career journey is make sure you learn how to think and not what to think. So many times, we’re just kind of given direction and it’s very easy to just take the direction and go. It’s a lot harder to have to figure it out yourself, which is why it’s always easier to edit a presentation than it is to create one. I think [in] most of our careers, in general, it’s our job to solve problems. The more we can be equipped to do that, the better you’re going to be served at any stage in your career regardless of what your objectives are or your goals are.

Johnson: What are the signs when someone is thinking “how,” not just “what”? What do you look for when you are bringing people up?

Stowers: Asking “why.” Because it’s a big difference between saying, “What do you want me to do?” and “Why do you want me to do that?” And we should always be asking “why” as many times as we can ask “why” until we can’t get there anymore. That’s how you get to the root cause. And some of that’s just the old “insights guy” in me coming out. Something I always teach my kids is “don’t ask what, ask why.” Sometimes it bites me, at least with my kids, but I think it’s the right way to think about things.

So AJ, looking back over your career, you’ve had several different chapters across different holding companies and moved your family across the world. Did you plan those in your career?

Johnson: No, no. I was quite happy living in London and it was a big surprise that I was offered a job to come to the States. And so obviously that’s a big decision to take as a family. My kids were 5 and 8, and I said to my husband — who had a perfectly lovely career over in England — “‘There’s an option to go to the States now.” And at the time I was at Ogilvy with WPP and it was moving to Chicago and he said, “When I married you, I knew this moment would come up, so let’s go for it.” So we decided as a family to move.

When I moved from one holding company to the other, that was obviously a deliberate choice that I was making and that was always about following really good people. That was about following people that inspired me that I loved working with.

Johnson: Would you consider marketing more of a science or more of an art?

Stowers: Well, I’m pretty sure, Angela, you know my answer to that, because of my background in insights and analytics. I think marketing on the whole is definitely more science driven. And here’s why. Any marketing initiative you take on, you need to have an objective. What are you trying to solve? And every objective should be quantifiable, measurable and defined before the project starts so you’re not rationalizing your way into success at the end.

So that makes it a science by default. Where it really gets interesting is using the science of that to say, “Okay, there’s a strategy, there’s an objective-strategy tactic. Are you leaning into a consumer insight? What is the problem you’re trying to solve for the consumer?” And all of those are scientific, based on the things you can learn that you can actually measure, test, do research for.

Where the art side comes in is really where the power of your agency partner comes in. It’s got to be something that resonates with a given audience. It’s got to be something that feels the passion and touches the person. When you really get into the emotion, that’s art.

It’s definitely a combination of the two and you should lean harder into one area in the earlier stages and harder into the other in the later stages.

Johnson: I always love reminding my teams that strategy is about making a choice. It’s about what you don’t do because you’re going to do this — you are blocking off options and you are deciding to do one thing. And that is absolutely both a science and an art, isn’t it?

Stowers: Yeah. And data will never tell you your strategy. To your point, it will inform your strategy. It will tell you the “what” and the “why,” it’ll never tell you the “how.” And that’s where the strategic part comes in. That’s how you need to figure out the “how” and that’s a strategic choice.

So Angela, what’s the definition of a good client–agency lead partnership?

Johnson: I think it’s two key things. One is that complete trust in the person — that they have nothing but your best interests and the interest of your business at heart. I would never come to you because I’ve been asked to sell something to you. I might have been, but I would never bring you anything that I didn’t think was going to make your business better, and I would never bring you anything that was detrimental in any way. It’s that trust that I am absolutely in deep on your business success as you guys are. I’ve kept in touch with all the clients that I’ve worked with throughout and become that friend, that person who you can trust.

It’s business at the core, but also your own personal kind of ability to navigate through things. You are a huge supporter of the agency relationship. What drives this spirit of partnership?

Stowers: So I think it’s a couple things and it’s all the things you just said. One is trust, one is relationship, because it’s not a transaction, it’s a relationship. And then next it is a partnership.

We’ve all had clients — on the agency side or on the client side — who have been guilty of doing this, [someone who] just says, “Go do this, go do that.” They never give you feedback, they never tell you why, they never say anything. And that’s not helping you grow or learn. And I look at our agency partners as extensions of our internal Subway teams and extend the same level of consideration, respect, and explanation that I would’ve to anyone on our team. And really, that’s how you build that trust.

The reality is, the trust side comes with letting people make mistakes. There’s that old quip from Einstein doing the nine times one, nine times two, and he gets to nine times 10 and he says 91, and everyone laughs at him. He’s like, “No one gave me kudos whenever I got the 9 out of 10 answers right. They picked on me for my one mistake.”

We all make mistakes. And on my teams, it’s always, “If we mess up, we’re ‘we.’ We celebrate the ‘me.’” So if the media team messes up, the media team messes up, not Angela or Shannon.

Johnson: Sometimes I worry that we’re like the annoying 4-year-old: “Why, but why, but why, but why.”

Stowers: That’s how we learn. To move forward.

Johnson: That’s right. You’re very tolerant of a lot of people on the team asking questions.

What has been the toughest decision you’ve had to make in your career?

Stowers: For me personally, it was choosing to be a little bit stagnant in my career for a number of years.

We have a unique family situation. I have a stepson — actually my wife and I are actually quite good friends with her [my wife’s] ex and his wife. And we all made an agreement a number of years ago that none of us would take a role that would force one of us to move, so we could always keep the family together. And due to just changing dynamics in the business I was in, I kind of sat at the same level in my career for about eight, nine years. And I was still learning, I was still growing, but it was also really hard to watch some of my peers that I was kind of on the same trajectory with early on skyrocket past me because of that choice.

It was a very hard choice. I don’t regret it one bit because for me, my family’s always going to come first. But I think it’s an interesting point for people as they go through their careers is, more often than not, you’re going to get faced with those choices. Obviously, you talked earlier about uprooting your family and moving all over the world.

Angela, here’s a really good one for you, and I expect you to go really deep on this because we’ve had conversations on this and I know how passionate you are about it. In addition to running business for Dentsu, you do a lot of work for women’s causes. What ignites your passion about that?

Johnson: I grew up in an environment where occasionally there were impediments, difficulties, happening to you because of what gender you were. And thankfully, due to a lot of hard work by a lot of people, and [due to] time moving on, that is less prevalent today.

But I still think women in advertising have a big need for an advocate, helping in your career as you move up, making sure that you’re not pulling the ladder up behind you. Sometimes women can be not as supportive to other women because it’s kind of like, “There’s only room for one of us in this boardroom and it’s me, and so I’m going to shut the door behind me or I’m going to pull the ladder up behind me,” and I haven’t got any time for that because I think that’s so debilitating and frankly, ridiculous.

I think a lot of it is going, “But there’s still some stuff out there that perhaps people don’t even notice they’re doing.” I’ll be in a meeting room and sometimes a man will repeat what a woman’s just said. It is then incumbent on people in the room, men and women, to point that out and don’t let that go. Or men talking over women. You point it out to them and they are so upset when they’re like, “Do I?” They don’t even know they’re doing it. And then they’re conscious and then they modify their behavior. So it can be little things like that, or it can be more systemic, but even the little things, they all add up.