Cindy Gallop Is Blowing Shit Up
The Michael Bay of Business keeps it real about sexual harassment in the industry, founding Make Love Not Porn, and putting women in charge of creative.
New York City is screaming at the top of its lungs today in the key of horn minor. Amidst the chorus of honks, Cindy Gallop’s telling me about blowing shit up, because she’s the Michael Bay of Business. She pauses between ending one interview gem to drop another and glances towards the window. “I’m sorry about that New York traffic,” she says with a smile on Zoom. “I’ll just let that very loud horn go by.”
It’s a simple gesture, the apology, because that traffic’s out of her control. But Gallop gets back to her thoughtful tirade about this fucked up industry without a second thought — leaving me dumbstruck at her kindness. When you have a resume, digital footprint, and iconic haircut like Gallop, you wave your hands in a quick motion to silence New York City, and it listens out of fear.
But Gallop isn’t your typical industry leader. That’s too plain. Warhead? Too harsh. Icon? Too soft. She dons a hard hat and swings a big ass hammer, pounding away at the foundation of advertising, culture, and creativity until she breaks the foundation to rebuild it.
Fighting against sexual harassment in advertising is her mission. She’s the only person to ever mention coming on someone’s face during a Ted Talk (six times, to be precise). Her social sharing platform MakeLoveNotPorn puts feelings back into sex for everyone to see — in an age where foreplay is equal to digital currency. Leaders in creative industries cite her thoughts more than the Bible. This is Gallop — the advertising consultant, founder and former chair of Bartle Bogle Hegarty in the US, founder of IfWeRanTheWorld and MakeLoveNotPorn — and, not to mention, NYC traffic apologist.
I’m shook — as would be any interviewer who steps in front of Gallop to hear her story.
Born in 1960, Lucinda Lee Gallop always loved advertising — an industry she says was always considered “sexy” in the UK. “Many years ago when I was in school, I had to do a project about ads,” she says, reflecting fondly. A grin spreads across her lips. “I’d always been interested in them and then I went to university and started working in theater.”
Yeah, that’s right. Theater — not ads. Gallop didn’t break right into her dream field. She also loved theater and took a pitstop there first. At Oxford University, she was the president of the drama society and wrote, acted, directed, and managed stage plays. Her love affair with being in front of audiences changed a bit though when she realized she didn’t think that she’d be able to be an actor or director. “My friends at Oxford pulled me into designing theater posters for their shows and, from that, I got sucked into helping them promote their plays.”
Gallop realized she loved doing it and accepted a job as a marketing and publicity officer for theaters in the UK. She worked at the Sherman Theater in Liverpool, the Yvonne AO Theater at Guilford, and then the Everyman Theater in Liverpool. But it would be her time as a marketing and publicity officer that would lead her to realize she would be perfect in the advertising industry.
After, during the course of her job, someone told her that she’d be great for a role in selling, Gallop decided to just reach out to agencies and ask them to hire her. That didn’t help. After joining the Milkround program in the UK, she got entry level experience in its training programs — spending a week at each of different agencies’ apartments to figure out what she liked best.
She took the first position she was offered, which was at the (now defunct) agency Ted Bates, working as an Account Manager for accounts like DHL and Snickers. After that, she became an Account Manager at JWT London and then an Account Director at Gold Greenlees Trott. She’d settle in at Bartle Bogle Hegarty in London in 1989 where she worked on accounts such as Ray-Ban and Coca-Cola, eventually opening up the US branch of the agency in 1998 and serving as the chair of the board.
That’s all I’m giving you here. A detailed Wikipedia page and receipt-length LinkedIn account will give you the full deets on the minute details of her life that can be found elsewhere. We spoke at length about much more than her story — some topics that will shock, sadden, and excite you about what she has in store for the future.
Here’s Cindy Gallop on everything that matters. And I mean everything.
What are some of the innate skills that people should have to be successful in this industry?
First of all, Trey, I'm gonna tell you that, quite frankly, my success was fundamentally down to luck. With both of the circumstances that I'm about to share with you, it wouldn't have mattered how brilliant I was.
The first reason that I got very lucky in my advertising career was because I was never sexually harassed in a way that ended my career — and I was absolutely sexually harassed, but not in a way that’s happened to so many other women that resulted in retaliation such as being managed out of the industry.
Two, I nearly always worked for men. I was incredibly lucky because at every agency I worked at, I worked for men who saw my potential before I did and wanted me to succeed. They championed me and gave me every opportunity to elevate. That isn’t the experience of most women in our industry.
Vast numbers of brilliant women got their careers derailed in advertising because of sexual harassment. Also, men sabotaged their ability to succeed and kept them down because they felt threatened by them.
How bad is this problem in 2023? Has cancel culture and taking accountability in this era had any benefit?
Sexual harassment is rampant in our industry and continues to be so to this day. Back in October of 2017, the New York Times ran their explosive Harvey Weinstein piece. So, without giving this very thought, I posted on Facebook, “Women of advertising, now's your chance to name the Harvey Weinsteins of our industry. Here's my email address. Email me, I can connect you with trusted journalists in our industry media who will report on this and break the stories.”
A total avalanche hit my inbox and proceeded for the next six months and continues to do so to this day. I have to tell you that for the next six months, it was enormously depressing for me to wake up every day and be horrified and disgusted at what was showing up in it.
Sexual harassment manages women out of the industry. Sexual harassment therefore robs the industry of the female leadership and power that would make this industry diverse and inclusive. I can tell you that despite all of my efforts, I could not get anybody to speak out on the record and name names.
One of the things that horrified me was the names, because these are the names of men I thought were good guys. Men who I thought of as friends, men who had sat across from me over a table in a restaurant, looked into my eyes and told me how much they support a woman. I still know who those men are, and those stories have never been broken.
So, no, that problem is as rife today as it's ever been. You would not believe how many rapists there are in the industry. They’ve never been brought to justice.
What do you think it'll take for the industry to become a better place? A complete changing of the guard?
Here's the reason why nothing has changed and nothing will change with the old world order here. At the top of our industry, as at the top of every industry, is a closed loop of white guys talking to white guys about other white guys. Those white guys are sitting very pretty. They have their huge salaries, enormous bonuses, big pools of stock options, and lavish expense accounts. Why on earth would they ever want to rock the boat?
For many years, my business speaking was focused on changing the system from within. Then I gave up because I realized it was never going to. For the past several years, my focus has been on changing the system from outside. And so my message to women and people of color in our industry is start your own industry.
When I say that, what I mean is start your own business. When you start your own business, you can make it work any way you want it to. You can design into that business, the workplace culture in which you thrive, the work-life balance. When you do that, you are starting the industry we all want to live and work in. When female, Black, people of color agency founders start their own industry and prove to this one that you can make an absolute fucking shit ton of money doing that, that when the old advertising gods look at all of us and go “fuck me, we’ve got to do it like that.”
Your explosive ability to shake the table is as well known as your tagline, “I like to blow shit up. I'm the Michael Bay of Business.” What does that mean?
That came about many years ago when I was in a meeting with a bunch of potential consultancy clients and I was talking to them about my approach to consulting. So I said to them, “I consult very selectively only for brands and clients who want to change the game in their particular sector. You come to me for radical, innovative, groundbreaking, and transformative ideas. I don't do status quo.”
Then lightheartedly, off the cuff, I said, “I like to blow shit up. I'm the Michael Bay of business,” and everyone laughed. After I left the meeting, I thought, actually, that's a very good way of summing up what I do.
I've been using that line ever since. The reason is because when I characterize what I do in that way, it attracts the people who want what I do and repels the ones who don't. I'm a great believer in being your own filter, deciding what you stand for, and putting that out in the universe. You will attract your tribe to you and keep away the people who don't want what you're about.
In 2009, you launched MakeLoveNotPorn.com. Could you tell me about what inspired that?
MakeLoveNotPorn was a complete and total accident. It came about because I date younger men that tend to be in their twenties. About 15 or 16 years ago, I began realizing, through my experience dating younger men, that when we don't talk openly and honestly about sex, porn becomes sex education by default — and not in a good way. I decided something about this because I thought, if this is happening to me, it must be happening to other people. So 14 years ago, I put up a clunky website at makelovenotporn.com that cost me no money.
The construct was porn world versus real world; here's what happens in the porn world versus here's what really happens in the real world. I launched MakeLoveNotPorn around the time of my 2009 Ted Talk. I became the only Ted speaker to say the words “come on my face” on the Ted stage, six times in succession. It went virtual and drove this extraordinary global response to my tiny website that I never anticipated.
Thousands of people wrote to me from every single country in the world, young and old, male and female, straight and gay, pouring their hearts out, telling me things about their sex lives and their porn watching habits they'd never told anyone before. I realized I'd uncovered a huge global social issue and felt a personal responsibility to make it more far reaching, helpful and effective.
I turned it into a business designed to do good and make money simultaneously. MakeLoveNotPorn is pro-sex, pro-porn, pro knowing the difference. We are the world's first and only user-generated 100% human-curated, social sex video-sharing platform. We’re what Facebook would be if it allowed you to socially sexually self express, which it clearly doesn't. The way to think about us is if porn is the Hollywood blockbuster movie, Make Love Not Porn is the much-needed documentary.
We are a unique window onto the funny, messy, loving, wonderful sex we all have in the real world. We are socializing, normalizing, and destigmatizing sex, bringing it out of the shadows into the sunlight to promote consent, communication, good sexual values and behavior.
In the last 14 years of MakeLoveNotPorn, what would you say has been the most surprising aspect of its growth?
Over the years that we've been operating as a business, we've especially observed that MakeLoveNotPorn is a revelation to men. More men send us grateful emails and leave appreciative comments than anybody else because we are something utterly unique that men will find nowhere else on the internet — which is a safe space where men can be and watch other men being open, emotional and vulnerable around sex. You would not believe the number of men who write to us regularly and say, I just watched my first video on MakeLoveNotPorn and, afterwards, I cried.
I'm trying to raise some serious funding right now to be able to scale. It’s very frustrating that my tiny team and I fight a battle every day to build MakeLoveNotPorn and keep it alive because every piece of business infrastructure takes us for granted since our content is about sex. We can't advertise on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, Google, YouTube or traditional media. And by the way, it's not just us. This is entirely gendered. Any sexual health and wellness venture through the female lens can't advertise (such as products for menstruation, menopause, and fertility).
In the meantime, for male sexual health and wellness products, it’s not a problem. Erectile dysfunction solutions, they’re everywhere. We are banned from doing paid search ads on Google.
It's infuriating because right now all around the world, everyday people search for MakeLoveNotPorn without knowing that we exist. The top organic search terms that send traffic to us are “make love,” “not porn,” and “real sex.” One young man told me that he found us when he Googled “porn that is not porn.”
The last question I have for use is if you could wish for anything in the advertising industry to come true, what would it be?
It would absolutely be to become female dominated. To have women running everything. Putting women creative directors in charge of creative ideas would make men so much happier and we would have a far more effective, lucrative industry. That’s the secret to the future. The primary target of all advertising is women.
We know how to talk to ourselves and as I've said for decades, there is a huge amount of money to be made out of taking women seriously. When our industry flips the gender ratio and is female dominated, it'll be so much more successful and thriving. We'll all make a ton more money and be a whole lot happier.
I was also never exposed to gender discrimination I’m advertising. Very equitable workplace.
I did engineer a ripper transfer once and the MD said he wanted to throw me out the window and I laughed and walked off. I suspect some people carry the I don’t give a shit vibe.