Zenith chief executive Natalie Cummins: getting ahead, flexibly

theguardian.com:

Brightly coloured printouts cover the walls in a meeting room at Zenith UK’s London headquarters, left behind from preparation for the previous week’s pitch, which saw the media agency battle it out against two rivals to win the business of a fast-food client.

Now the wait is on, laughs its chief executive, Natalie Cummins: “We now have a week or two of agonising over the follow-up communications and trying to read into anything they say to you, so you can endlessly speculate.”

She is hoping the company will become the 84th client at Zenith, joining what she calls an “eclectic mix” that ranges from young upstarts such as social media app TikTok to more traditional companies such as Reckitt Benckiser, maker of Dettol and Durex.

If you’ve seen an advert on television, in the pages of the newspapers or on a billboard for companies including Lloyds Bank, Carpetright, or Nestlé, Zenith will have played a major role in getting it in front of your eyeballs.

Cummins has led the media agency – part of the French advertising giant Publicis – since 2018, helping it achieve £418m of billings last year alone, according to Nielsen’s annual league table. Those figures are all the more impressive given she has juggled her role with being a lone parent to three children under 13, a factor that influenced her company’s full embrace of flexible working even before the pandemic.

So what exactly does Zenith do? “We plan and buy advertising on behalf of major clients,” says Cummins, sitting in its offices in the fashionable building in White City that was once BBC Television Centre. “I say planning and buying, because you can’t just go out and buy a load of stuff: you have to work out what you are trying to do with this ad. Are you trying to get