A leading figure in Ireland’s media landscape for decades, Liam McDonnell recently retired as chief executive of Dentsu Ireland.
The former board member of the Marketing Institute of Ireland and director of the Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland (IAPI) had a storied career long before he ever joined Dentsu.
It included stints with ad agency Des O’Meara and board positions at Irish International and Saatchi & Saatchi Dublin before he left to co-found All Ireland Media (AIM) with fellow industry stalwart Pat Donnelly.
In 2002 AIM was Ireland’s largest independent media agency when it was acquired by Aegis and renamed Carat, before ultimately being bought by Dentsu, in 2013, with McDonnell at the helm.
Not a bad performance for someone who started in the industry by accident.
His father, frustrated at his son’s apparent unwillingness to either study or work after his Leaving Cert, told him of a job as a messenger at some office on Leeson Street.
If only to get his father off his back, the young McDonnell rocked up to what was The Media Bureau, the media buying and planning agency headed up by the late Michael Bowles, “a lovely man”, he tells Winterlich.
McDonnell didn’t so much find his calling as discover that ad folk, at least back in the day, drove cool cars. One colleague, former IAPI head honcho Steve Shanahan, drove a canary yellow Toyota Celica. Another, PR supremo, Paul Kelly, drove a racy Renault Fuego.
While McDonnell’s job as a runner didn’t come with a car, he got to borrow everyone else’s while running important errands, such as picking up chopped liver “from a fancy butcher on Baggott Street” for the pâté one of his bosses wanted to make for a party.
No lower entrée to the industry was there but perhaps no better one, both McDonnell and Winterlich agree.
Bowles wasn’t even paying him, McDonnell points out. He was actually on an Anco course, a forerunner of Fás, now Solas.
“I got 25 quid a week for it, and Michael would give me some petrol money. But I watched, I listened, and I learned. In time they let me buy some local press, and that’s how I started,” he says.
Liver and onions
For all the increased professionalisation of the industry subsequently, which today extends to postgraduate academic programmes, there is no better grounding than to start at the bottom, they reckon.
“Michelin star chefs start out by chopping onions. Just seeing how an agency works is a great way in and something that I think has been lost in the professionalisation of our agency,” says Winterlich.
McDonnell’s route wasn’t unique at the time, he points out, being mirrored by the many who started as secretaries in the industry.
It is in part why, during his time in IAPI, he focused on apprenticeships, both to foster diversity and widen the talent net, which ultimately proved good for businesses.
For his part, it wasn’t academic credentials that qualified him for his career, but rather some innate characteristics. “I was lucky with some of the natural attributes I came into life with. The first is curiosity. I’m mad curious. Always have been, always will,” says McDonnell.
“The second, although I probably denied it or didn’t even recognise it, is that I was hugely ambitious. I was also driven which I don’t think is the same thing. With hindsight, I can also see that a bit of me was incessantly paranoid, never happy.”
It proved a good mix for advertising. “When you roll all those ingredients into a recipe, the dish you come out with is somebody who wanted to let nobody down internally or externally. Who wanted to win and who wanted to get acknowledged. And the way you get acknowledged in our business, traditionally, is through repeat business,” says McDonnell.
“If you distil it down, what we do is sell trust and if you break that, you don’t get a second chance.”
Imposter syndrome
One of the biggest lessons he learned during his time as a director of IAPI, gleaned while travelling around the country to meet all its members, is the sheer breadth of talent the industry has here.
Too often, however, businesses do themselves a disservice simply because they are so competitive. “We will sell our granny for a pitch win,” he says.
It’s short-termism that, by its nature, undervalues the work being done and is borne, Winterlich agrees, of an industry-wide imposter syndrome, a doubting of self-worth.
“We really want to look like consultants, yet we’re not consultants. We don’t diagnose, give you a white paper and walk away. We are practitioners, we do things. We’re sleeves up, in there,” says Winterlich.
The best agencies are like skunkworks, says McDonnell, pointing to the famous creative shed at the back of US defence Lockheed which hacked together the U-2 spy plane in the 1950s.
“But at our worst, we’re a bunch of naive youngsters who really haven’t a clue, who might know how to look after a client or how to buy media or how to create an ad, but don’t have clue how to run a business,” says McDonnell.
He learned about business the hard way, at the front. At one stage he recalls losing one account, Guinness, which accounted for 38 per cent of total turnover.
A textbook lesson in the risks of having a case of too many eggs in one basket, it could have proven devastating but he and his co-founder Donnelly, who, at 10 years his senior, he describes as being a “big brother” figure to him, weathered the storm.
When, years later, the pair sold the business to Aegis, Donnelly left but McDonnell stayed on. “I supposed I wanted to prove I could do it without Pat,” he says.
Lasting impressions
McDonnell, who worked with several industry luminaries down through the years, namechecks in particular Shenda Loughnane, now global brand president at Dentsu X, Dave Nee co-founder of Cawley Nea, and the late renowned copywriter Catherine Donnelly.
But arguably it was the extraordinary clients that inspired him most.
“Philip Hamill, head of the Euro Changeover Board of Ireland, was a client, an extraordinary man, and lovely with it,” says McDonnell. Having come from the Department of Finance to launch the euro in Ireland, McDonnell expected Hamill to know nothing of the world of advertising.
“Yet he always asked questions in the nicest way possible and always got you thinking in a different way. After a couple of years working with him, he knew more about our business than we did, he was just so impressive,” he says.
Similarly, he credits Bernard Balderston, former media controller at Procter & Gamble UK with expanding his abilities.
“When I was in Saatchi’s I managed P&G and Barnard used to send everything by fax. I’d get this one-paragraph fax and I’d be working on it day and night for three weeks trying to answer it. It was like an exam, and he’d let you know if you didn’t answer properly. As time went on, I did answer them properly,” he says.
“And the beauty of it was, like everything in life, all that work didn’t just stop at P&G, as we found down the years, we could use it for Guinness, or Mars, or Coke.”
His father needn’t have worried. McDonnell is still working, providing mentoring to children in Deis schools, and indeed still being schooled himself. “You just try to listen, observe and learn,” he says.
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