Power Players with Brian Sozzi · Sep 28, 2026 · 25m · 14m saved
With Mark Penn, CEO of Stagwell, formerly Chief Strategy Officer at Microsoft
Mark Penn started Stagwell 10 years ago on his own. It now employs about 13,500 people and brings in close to $3 billion of revenue, he said.
Investors worried that AI would wipe out advertising agencies. Penn said AI arrived at an ideal time for Stagwell, which had been building AI products for years and now sells them to clients.
"New technology is about doing things we always wished we could do, but couldn't do in the past."
Mark Penn, CEO of Stagwell, on Power Players with Brian Sozzi. He was Bill Clinton's White House pollster, spent 13 years working with the Clintons, and at Microsoft ran a $2 billion advertising budget before becoming chief strategy officer.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 25 minutes of audio, 11 minutes of reading.
Here are the 12 lessons that matter.
Key Takeaways
Stagwell's research told American Eagle not to pull the Sydney Sweeney ad, and Penn said the campaign was worth billions of dollars
A good campaign can beat a bad one about 8 to 1, because each of four ingredients can differ by about 2 to 1
The big holding companies' agencies "more or less hated each other", so Stagwell caps how many of one kind of agency it owns
The typical CMO lasts about 18 months, so a CEO with a 10-year tenure goes through four or five
AI helped Stagwell rather than hurting it, and the firm now sells AI products to clients to run on their own systems
Big brands will stay out of the midterms and the 2028 race, while politics is about 10% of Stagwell's business
He called the coming election spending a "political super cycle"
1. A Challenger to the Big Four
Penn said Stagwell was set up as the challenger in marketing services. He started it with one person, then merged it in 2021 with a company that was already public.
"Differentiated from the other companies, which frankly, no one had come along for 40 or 50 years or more into this industry and made it to be a real competitor to these 3 or 4 big companies and we today are a real competitor and in that space." — Mark Penn
Asked what he saw 10 years ago, he said many people had his idea but did not make it. He saw the big agencies falling behind as marketing moved from buying ad space to online performance marketing, which targets and measures each ad.
The holding companies had grown too big to serve clients well, he said
"And then I just saw the whole business practices that internally the holding companies have gotten too big, too bureaucratic, and too internally competitive to really, I think, hit the mark for clients." — Mark Penn
Stagwell today is close to $3 billion of revenue
"Our business today is about 13,500 people, close to $3 billion of revenue." — Mark Penn
"You know, we're, we're projected to about 500 million of EBITDA." — Mark Penn
He credited a team that has worked with him across marketing services for many years, with expertise in both marketing and the digital systems that sit underneath it.
