Back in 2016 there were a lot of things happening at the top levels of ad agencies, with a huge scandal erupting at JWT as the former CEO Was sued for sexual harassment. Economic Times India wrote about the new CEO Tamara Ingram. Archive here.
When the issue was iron-hot, we had reached out to global trade portal Adland’s CEO, Åsk Dabitch, who had this to say about the incident: “JWT seems to have an unfortunate knack of putting the wrong people in top positions, where they really shouldn’t be. I am reminded of the Vodafone case study out of J Walter Thompson Cairo, which claimed that Egypt’s Revolution was a result of Vodafone. There’s a special kind of cynical brashness that creates that type of case study, and it comes from the top. Martinez seems to be a Latino stereotype, judging by everything that he has allegedly said. Ironically, everything he is accused of saying is stereotyping others too.”
But the incident is not a representative of what the company is like, Eastwood asserts. “I look at our leadership at that time - the worldwide CCO is gay, CFO is Jewish, talent officer is a woman, and the CEO is Hispanic himself - we were pretty diverse, still are.” Just a week before Martinez announced his exit, J Walter Thompson had launched Her Story - a series of documentaries on female revolution - with BBC World News. “You can’t be what you can’t see,” he reasons.
