Stagwell Doubles New Business Team as Holdco Competition Heats Up, Says CEO Mark Penn

We’re also learning it takes a while to integrate these bigger accounts. So, a lot of the upside from those accounts will be seen really next year or later this year because the integration time is significant.

Is there a sector that you see room for improvement in at Stagwell?

We’re already in the process of expanding the talent in our media group. A lot of the other companies are focused on media. Almost their whole company is focused on media. 

For us, the other divisions are really the growth engines of the company right now. But we believe that our performance-oriented, technology-first approach is something that we’re going to really ramp up in terms of introducing it into the marketplace.

Last year, Stagwell announced a 35% stake in Real Clear Politics. What was the reasoning behind that?

We’re developing an owned media portion of what we do. We’re making sure Real Clear Politics gets the kind of advertising and operations that it really deserves. All it does is get incredible high-level political junkies on the site. So it’s going to be monetized well for the election. 

How is the current market disruption impacting Stagwell?

We think that it is a market of opportunity for us. We’ve gone from being a group of companies that had good reputations but weren’t really at scale to be a unit. Now more clients are saying, ‘Well, who’s really a scaled alternative to the holding companies that can get our work done on a global basis?’ 

We’ve achieved something that nobody really has achieved in 50 or 100 years, which is to form a real competitor, a real technology-first, creative competitor at a scale where you can give us IBM, you can give us Mondelez, you can give us those kinds of major brands. 

You said that Stagwell is fourth in the holdco power rankings. Are you content being fourth? What is your growth mindset?

I’m happy to be fourth in revenue, but first in digital transformation. I think some of the other companies have gotten too big, and when they got too big, they couldn’t really adapt to technology.

I like to say that most of our competitors are figuring out how to lay off the next 1,000 people, and we’re still looking at the next 1,000 people that we’re going to hire.

We’re 13,500 people. I think that’s a great scale to have in a world of transformation. It’s big enough to handle these kinds of scales, but it’s small enough to adopt new technologies. 

How has the war in Iran impacted business?

Only 3% of our business is in the Middle East. It has slowed down some. Tourism is not exactly thriving at the moment there, and we do have some tourism clients, but it’s overall such a small part of the business. I’m hopeful of its overall growth over time.