DRAGON LADY OF ADVERTISING

AsiaOne
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Nov 19 2008
Singapore

Linda Locke, arguably the most famous woman in the Singapore
advertising industry, sweeps into the Giorgio Armani boutique at the
Hilton Gallery, dressed in all black.

As her three-quarter-length coat swishes dramatically about her
imposing 1.75m frame, her John Woo-like entrance – sans doves and
guns – makes this reporter think how apt it is that her company is
named Godmother Consulting.

‘I’m not inclined to leave horses’ heads in people’s beds,’ she
responds dryly, referring to the famous scene in the movie The
Godfather, when a Mafia don leaves the head of a prized horse in a
Hollywood producer’s bed after he refuses to do the don a favour.

In truth, she named her company Godmother because she has eight
godchildren. But if people do indeed call her The Godmother, with its
negative connotations of being controlling and ambitious, it would
not be news to Locke.

Within the advertising industry, she has been called some bad
names. And she knows it.

‘Dragon Lady and worse, probably,’ she says with a laugh. ‘B****’
is another epithet she has had to brush off as she goes about doing
what she is paid to do.

Shying away from difficult situations is not her style. Particularly
when the advertising business, she says, is a ‘highly competitive,
high-octane environment with very tough time and cost pressures from
demanding clients with their own pressures’.

Surely you do not expect her to reach the apex of such a profession
by trying to please everyone. In her 30-year career, she has headed
two of the biggest advertising agencies in Singapore, helmed some
groundbreaking advertising campaigns and collected numerous awards,
including Singapore’s first Cannes Gold Lion, the Academy Awards of
advertising, in the early 1990s.

‘The people who are good at what they do are not afraid of the
truth. These are not the ones who call me ‘Dragon Lady’. They say
I’m tough but fair,’ she says. ‘The less competent ones use insults
to make themselves feel better.’

Has she ever shouted at her staff? Her response: She doubts there is
a manager on the planet who has not had to raise his voice at some
point or other.

Wouldn’t you do it, she asks, if you saw a subordinate steaming open
an envelope to check a colleague’s salary?

Last month, Locke, 55, was given the Lifetime Achievement Award
by the Institute of Advertising Singapore, a professional body for
advertising and communications practitioners.

She is the first woman to receive the award since the institute
introduced it 10 years ago. Past recipients include Ian Batey, the
man behind Singapore Airlines’ Singapore Girl, and Jim Aitchison,
author of the Sarong Party Girl books.

Locke, who quit as chairman and regional creative director of Leo
Burnett last year after 10 years to start Godmother Consulting,
is refreshingly frank about the award.

Considered one of the women pioneers in the male-dominated industry,
she says: ‘I was surprised that it took this long. I don’t normally
say this but I do feel this was late in coming. I just have a feeling
that I would have received it earlier if I had been a man.

‘I have rarely encountered sexism in my career. This is about the
only time it’s crossed my mind.’

A young Linda Locke strikes a pose that is similar to something she
might do in adulthood.

Bold moves

Locke was born in Singapore to a British father and a
Portuguese-Armenian mother, whose family has deep roots here.

D’Almeida Street in the Central Business District is named after her
mother’s family and the national flower, the Vanda Miss Joaquim orchid,
after her great-great-grandaunt.

When she was eight, her father was posted to Malaysia as regional
marketing director of Cold Storage supermarket and the family relocated
along with him. At 11, she left for a boarding school in England and
her siblings, a younger sister and brother, followed suit a year later.

In 1983, the art and design graduate from Middlesex Polytechnic in
England joined the local Saatchi & Saatchi office as creative director
after a few years working at other agencies here as art director.

Within a year, she was promoted to chief executive officer to rescue
the ailing Saatchi.

Naturally, she was ‘absolutely terrified’ – she was a creative person
by inclination and training with zero business experience. And she
had been in the industry for only six years.

‘I inherited a business that had business pouring out the door,’ Locke
recalls. ‘We had to fight to bring in business. I made sure that they
brought the regional finance director to be based in Singapore so I
would have somebody to mentor me in finance. The situation was, in
a way, forced on me. I took a chance, thinking, ‘If I fail, I fail.’ ‘

She did much better than fail. Playing a dual role as executive
creative director and CEO, she grew the company from a $6-million
agency to a $100-million firm during her 14-year tenure.

At that time, she was the first and only Singaporean woman to run an
international advertising agency here.

What she lacked in formal business education, she made up for in
other qualities. She is bold, for one thing.

In 1986, she won a major Government advertising contract to market
Singapore, which was in the throes of a recession.

‘At that time, there was wholesale panic that all the multinational
companies would pull out of Singapore,’ she recalls. The Government
wanted to place an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal to
reassure investors.

‘I showed our dummied-up ad to Philip Yeo, then the chairman of the
Economic Development Board. Our headline was: ‘Who would be mad enough
to invest in Singapore in a recession?’ And underneath that were all
these signatures of global heads of multinationals that were invested
in Singapore, saying, ‘We are. We are, too. So are we.’

‘He flipped out when he saw it and said, ‘My minister would never
buy this’. And I said, ‘If your minister is the man I think he is,
he will buy it because he will know we need to be this bold’.

‘Later that afternoon, he rang me and said, ‘The minister says do it."

The advertisement was a success.

‘They told me that when Mr Lee Hsien Loong went to the United States
and walked into the auditorium, there was a standing ovation and the
people were all waving copies of the Wall Street Journal.

‘I wish I had been there; it would have been the high point of my
career. I really feel, in my own little way, I made a significant
difference to Singapore.’

Her ex-colleague, Mr Tay Guan Hin, regional executive creative director
of advertising agency JWT in South-east Asia, says: ‘She always tries
to provide a solution that tackles the situation head-on. She worked
hard and always tried to find the best in the worst.’

Her good friend, copywriter Rita Haque, adds: ‘Linda has a consuming
passion for work – she never knew when to stop. She also has a
never-say-die attitude and is extremely meticulous.’

Locke with husband Phillips Connor and their son Jackson, who was
six years old in this photograph. The boy is now 12.

Mellowed by motherhood

You do not need to have worked with Locke to know that last mentioned
quality of hers. Just observe her for a couple of hours. Coming
into this interview, she did her homework on this reporter and read
his stories.

She chose to be photographed at the Giorgio Armani shop for two
reasons: One, she is currently the marketing consultant for Club 21
which brings in the designer brand; and two, she thought it would
create a neat background story since she used to wear only Armani in
her high-powered businesswoman heyday.

It seems that this former creative director cannot help herself
in wanting to art direct this story. ‘I’m very detail-oriented,’
she admits. ‘I try to pre-empt possible scenarios and plan for them
ahead of time.’

But she denies that she is a control freak. She knows this amorphous,
unpredictable thing called life cannot be art directed. She also
knows logic and reason are not everything.

‘I’m a very highly intuitive person,’ she says.

And how. In 1983, after only seven days of courtship ‘spread out over
a three- week period’, she married Neil French, the famous advertising
man known for his provocative campaigns and comments.

The people closest to her thought she was ‘barking mad’ but she did
not care. ‘It just felt right intuitively that I was meant to marry
this man.’

They divorced in 1992. She wanted children, he did not. She says:
‘It would have gone on if I had accepted not having children. That
was why I left him. It was not a nasty leaving.’

She adds: ‘Ironically, he called me last year to apologise to me. He
has adopted a child and he’s happier than he’s ever been in his
life. He said I was right about what having a child would do to him.’

Does she regret the marriage? No, it all worked out for the best. ‘I
told Neil, ‘It’s fine. I wouldn’t have the child that I have now if
I were married to you."

After five in-vitro fertilisation treatments at the National University
Hospital, she conceived her son Jackson with current husband Phillips
Connor, a 50-year- old interior designer from the United States,
whom she married in 1993.

Today, Jackson is 12 years old. They live in a conservation shophouse
on the edge of Chinatown.

‘Motherhood did mellow me,’ says Locke. ‘You can have the worst day
in the office, then when you go home and a little body flies into
your arms, all of that is forgotten. You can’t help but be softened
by that. I have learnt to not hurt those who are not so competent.’

She has always loved children. ‘When I was struggling to have a baby,
my friends and family kept making me godmother to their children
because they knew how badly I wanted to have a child.’

After Jackson was born, she wanted another baby and underwent IVF
another seven times, all to no avail. But no matter. She is ‘madly in
love’ with Jackson. ‘I don’t think you discover your humanity until
you have a child,’ she says.

She is winding down professionally to spend more time with her
family. Godmother Consulting is not meant to challenge the big
boys in the industry. It is a one-person operation for Locke in
semi-retirement mode.

‘I used to work seven days a week,’ she says. Now it is just four.

‘If I were still the CEO of an agency and we’re going into the current
economic downturn, I’d be looking at books and worrying about the
staff we might have to cut. It’s a terrible pressure to have to carry
that type of load,’ she says.

‘Right now, to have to be responsible only to myself and my family
is an extremely pleasurable experience.’

This article was first published in The Straits Times on Nov 17, 2008.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress