Welcome to the Creative Genius Podcast, Kelly. So great to have you.

Thank you, Gail. It’s delightful to be here. I really appreciate it.

Well, I’m looking forward to our conversation. Everybody talks to me about PR all the time. And before we do that, let’s talk about how you got into the industry and how long you’ve been doing all of this.

You know, I got into the industry actually kind of out of a habit stance in that as a child, I’m severely dyslexic and was actually back in the sixties when you were dyslexic, you were put with mentally retarded children and then had to work my way out of that back into mainstream school. And when I was in high school, I started selling ad space for the choir directory.

And I happened to live next door to a gentleman who ran an ad agency. And he said to me, after two years of me walking up to his door and selling him ads in this choir directory, he was like, you know, Kelly, you would be very good at advertising sales. And I said, well, what is that? And he goes, exactly what you’re doing, only for magazines, newspapers, television or radio at the time. And I said, well, you know, that’s something I could pass in college. Cause I knew where my strengths and weaknesses were.

with education and I really wanted a business degree, but I couldn’t pass the economics and some of the more detailed accounting classes because of my dyslexia. And I could major in journalism and advertising sales and minor in business and understand marketing. So that is where that came from. My first semester, I actually started selling ad space for the Iowa Daily Press Association or the Iowa State Daily Newspaper.

and to make sure that I liked ad sales at the very beginning. And past my first semester called my parents and they were absolutely ecstatic because the doctors had told my parents I’d never go to college and I would never become really anything. So they were absolutely thrilled. I’d passed a semester, I’d figured out how to go to classes and be successful in my own right.

which I credit them for never telling me what the doctors had actually told them.

Thank goodness for that because then you would have had a wrong impression because obviously you’ve been very successful at what you’ve done. Yes.

So then my dream job was to become an ad salesperson for Better Homes and Gardens magazine, which was, went to Iowa State, which is only 45 minutes from the Meredith Corporation at the time, and ended up being hired at Meredith for a experimental training program in advertising sales. They never hired college graduates. And I trained for a year in all the aspects of publishing, circulation, marketing, editing.

I went on the road with advertising salespeople across the corporation. And then at the end of my year, I had a choice between to work on Better Homes and Gardens, my dream job, between San Francisco and New York City. Chose San Francisco and I was the first female hired ever to sell advertising space for Better Homes and Gardens magazine. Ew. Yeah. So it was really cool. It was a very interesting time.

Good night.

for women in business in 1982, 83, and there weren’t very many of us. And now the advertising industry is actually predominantly women. But it’s been a wonderful career and a really fascinating ride of understanding and seeing all the differences that has happened in the industry from the 80s to now.

Well, now I know we have a lot of other things we can talk about, how did I not know you were in Iowa?

I don’t know. I don’t think we ever talked about it. I was only there for the four years. My parents, I went to high school in Jacksonville, Florida. My parents had a deal that they would only pay for school in the state that they lived. And two weeks after I graduated from high school, they moved to Des Moines for my dad’s job. So I reapplied. I was going to the University of Florida, all set to be a Gator. And that didn’t happen. I went to Iowa State.

I don’t think so

Isn’t that funny? Well, I was born in Iowa and lived there till I was seven. My parents were from there. I have, I’m a true Midwestern girl, just transplanted to the South against my will. But you know, you do what you do. luckily I made lifetime friends as a result of that. So it’s all good. We all have good things that we have that come out of everything that is a challenge for us. Right.

It was very interesting. didn’t know that the temperature went below zero. I did not know that ice formed on the inside of car windows as well as the outside. It was very educational for a little girl from the South. But it was good.

All bad. All bad.

Yeah, in Jacksonville, that’s a, I’ve only been there once. It’s a lovely area. we have a great client there. Actually, we have a few clients in that area, so that’s, that’s great.

Yeah, it’s a beautiful city. love going back and visiting. I still have friends there, so it’s really nice. That’s how I fell in love with the coast and actually how I ended up in Charleston.

I see. Yeah. Well, I love the coast and anytime I can go see an ocean, I’m a happy girl. Well, tell me about the changes you’ve seen in the publishing industry over the last several years.

you know, it’s, it’s been dramatic. you know, starting out in the eighties there, you know, there was no voicemail back then. There was, you got a little pink slip of paper when you got a message and we had just gotten Selectric typewriters and the fax machine had just started with the waxy paper. Then we moved into, you know, computers and, car phones and cell phones and email. Yes, the big bricks and email and.

You know, the business as a whole, when I started out in it, it was really five industries. had newspaper, magazines, television. There was no actual cable at the time that hadn’t even started yet. And then you had outdoor and radio. And those were the key areas where advertising took place. Now, if you look across the board, the pie, as I refer to it, has grown exponentially. The interesting thing

that has occurred across all of advertising, not just in the publishing space, is that the budgets and the large budgets as well as the small budgets have remained pretty stagnant over the past, say five to even 10 years. They’d go up a percentage, go down a couple percentage points, that kind of thing. But your proliferation of choice of where to put that money has grown exponentially.

So all of the mediums actually get smaller percentages of the pie. So it’s a very different way of looking at where does the ad bu