McKinney, the Durham-based advertising giant founded in Raleigh in 1969, announced an extension of sorts to its downtown presence in January. It had created a new role: managing director of its Durham office. And it had just one person in mind: Gretchen Walsh.
“Gretchen,” CEO Joe Maglio, who is based in the agency’s New York office, said in the company announcement, “was the obvious choice for the job.”
McKinney, in fact, created the role for her. She had been in Durham since 2004, the year McKinney moved there, and had her hand in many successes over the years. Now she has the wide-reaching job description that comes with them.
“I grew up at McKinney,” Walsh said in McKinney’s office at American Tobacco Campus. “I started in media planning, then I worked in strategy and led strategy for our largest client at the time, then went to account management, heading up some of our biggest clients.”
The new role was not about changing jobs as much as it was about doing more.
“I still lead those businesses, and I spend a lot of my time pitching business,” she said, having recently added, among others, Choice Hotels and the jewelry stores, Jared. She politely declined to give revenue figures, but the agency counts Sony, Audi, Sherwin Williams and many other large companies as clients.
“One of the things that is incredibly important to us,” she said, “is our culture and our relevance and our creativity, and that becomes top of mind every day” for the whole team, which in the Durham office is 122 strong.
This role “allows me to continue to work in the business, and also help shape and guide where we want to go for the future. I think that was important for us to have that role down here in Durham.”
So, what is her strategy to managing the many competing priorities?
“I’m an avid runner,” Walsh said.
“I’m actually getting ready to run the Boston Marathon in a couple of weeks (April 15), so just add that to the list,” she said, laughing.
Training for a marathon, she said, is “a good metaphor for how it all works.”
“I go from a 22-mile run,” on one day, she said, to running “short hills,” then “come back to do track work.” She continued, “I think that’s how I work at the office. Some of it is long-haul, keep-it-going and getting better incrementally. Other days it’s these sprints that you have to get done and prioritize.
“It’s how my mind runs, it’s how my body runs, it’s kind of how I think about running an office as well.”
Boston will be her eighth marathon, so she knows how to pace a grueling course, and how having a familiarity with the terrain can be an advantage.
The agency bills itself as, “One agency, two doors,” and though McKinney has an office in New York – 15 employees – Durham is in its bones.
“New York is by many measures the greatest city in the world,” the agency writes in a brochure explaining its footprint here. “But only 6% of Americans live in New York.” Durham “puts us squarely in a place where regular people live ‘real life.’”
Employees who have moved from big cities love it here, she said.
“We couldn’t exist today without Durham.”
So they give back.
McKinney raised $1 million for local charities from 2006-2015 during the company’s Triangle Corporate Battle of the Bands. It handles communications for Urban Ministries of Durham, the nonprofit providing food and shelter to homeless individuals, and has a partnership with the startup incubator American Underground. Forty three percent of McKinney’s employees live in Durham.
And the character of the employees is as important as that of the city.
It’s something that came to mind as she filled in to teach an advertising class at UNC this semester.
“It’s funny, the professor who I was substituting for last week was talking about doing this team activity with his students, and it was actually hard for them to get that team concept,” she said. “You have one person not doing anything and one person trying to do everything, and I said, ‘That is so important when you get a real job, to work together as a team.’”
She continued: “Understanding human behavior is so much what advertising is about.”
It is a virtue they expect even from their interns.
“For me,” she said when asked what she would say to those just starting out in the industry, “they need to have an innate curiosity about a lot of different things. I was not an advertising major, but I look for people who want to understand how people think,” and “who are not just interested in Googling the next piece of research but are actually out in the real world.
“Be interesting and be interested,” she said, “and you’ll have a much better advertising career.”
