Ogilvy’s Shelly Lazarus on holding onto one’s passion: ‘You have to love this business’

Lazarus first found her way into the marketing world in the late 1960s, around the time in which the TV show Mad Men takes place – a time when there weren’t many women occupying higher-level positions within agencies. From the beginning, Lazarus chose to view her position within a predominantly male industry not as an obstacle, but as an opportunity.

The Drum spoke with Lazarus to learn more about the origins of her career, the sources of her unsheakable optimism and resolve, and the lessons she's learned along the way.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you tell us the story of how you ended up pursuing an MBA at Columbia?

I was in love. The man who’s now been my husband for 50-plus years was in medical school. If we wanted to get married, I was going to have to work, and that was okay. But if you were a woman in 1968 and you wanted to work in the commercial world, that meant you were going to type. I must have looked so crestfallen in one of these interviews when the HR person, who was a woman, said the job was actually typing, and she said, ‘I’ll bet if you got an MBA, they couldn't make you type.’ I didn’t know what an MBA was, to tell you the truth, but I found out. So I applied to get an MBA at Columbia just because I didn’t want to type … and then, out of all the courses I took, I discovered that I really loved marketing. And so a career path started to form, although I wasn‘t exactly sure how it was going to turn out.

What were those early years like as a woman working in a male-dominated marketing industry?

My first job was working as an intern in the Maxwell House division of General Foods. There had never been a woman working there in a professional capacity before. Some product manager walked into the boss’s office, because he had heard that a woman had been hired for the summer, and he said, ‘Well, you can do what you want, but she can’t work for me … what if I told her she did something wrong and she cried?’ This is 1968 or '69. It was just a whole different world. I just didn’t pay that much attention to all that brown noise that was going on around me. I had this job and I just loved it. Some guys from the company had to leave to fight in the Vietnam War, so I was doing the work of three men. And, quite importantly, Ogilvy was the agency. So my first contact with Ogilvy was with me as the client and it as the agency. And I just thought [Ogilvy] was amazing.

Did you ever feel disheartened hearing those kinds of comments from male colleagues? Was there anything that kept you feeling encouraged during that period?

I never felt that I was taken any less seriously or that I wasn’t given an opportunity because I was a woman. As a matter of fact, I was so unusual in that crowd that a disproportionate amount of attention was paid to me – in a positive way. It just kind of worked for me. One of the things that Mad Men got right was that almost every woman in advertising who was in an executive position had started off as a secretary. I was sort of the first one who came in with an MBA, so I was in a slightly different place.

What gave me courage was the fact that almost everything we were selling, we were selling to women. And I literally was the only woman in the room. So rather than feeling enfeebled in any way, I had this enormous power. Because invariably, at some point during the meeting, someone would turn to me and say, ‘Well, Shelly, what do women think?’ And so for years I was talking on behalf of all women, and because I had this unique perspective, it gave me confidence.

What have been some big sources of inspiration for you throughout your career?

It’s the people I work with. Their ability to solve a problem in a completely new way that I had never thought of still takes my breath away. It’s so exciting for me to be on this journey where we’re trying to figure out how to do something and to have people alongside me who see the world in completely different ways. It’s always fresh, it’s always new and it’s never boring. That’s something that’s true every day; it’s been a constant throughout my experience working at Ogilvy.

Is there any advice that you’d like to give to a young marketer who’s just getting started in the industry?

You have to love this business and you have to be honest with yourself about whether you find it exciting and whether it presents the intellectual challenges that keep you growing and keep you alive. That’s where all the joy is. So my best advice is: If you don’t love it, go find something else you do love.

All through my career, since I was a woman who had children, younger women would always ask me: ‘How do you find balance?’ And I would always say, ‘Well, you better love what you do, because you’re gonna love your children (most days) and if you don’t have a pull on the other side in the work that you’re doing, your life will never be in balance. You’ll resent every minute that you’re being distracted and taken away from the things that you love to do something that you find tedious, boring and trivial. On the other hand, if you love what you do, you love the puzzle of it, you love the freshness of it, you love the people you’re working with, then it’s easy to find balance, because you’re just trying to allocate your time between things that you love. And that’s so much easier to do than figuring out how to continue in a job from which you get very little satisfaction and joy.’

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