Gail Heimann and the business of being interesting

Gail Heimann’s job interview came with a Christmas tree and half a beer. She and Andy Polansky met at Rockefeller Center before the holidays, split a large bottle of Dead Guy, and discussed a job leading the HP business. The beer’s name makes the eventual career move sound like a warning from a novelist. In her recollection, it was simply the beginning of a working relationship that would last for decades.

The detail is worth keeping because executive careers are usually cleaned up for public consumption. A little mess survives here: a shared bottle, a specific place, a conversation. Before the titles and the jury appointments, two people had to decide whether they wanted to work together.

When the brand becomes the event

Consider some of the work that followed. Heimann’s campaign credits include a three-story Lady Liberty M&M floating in New York Harbor, a vast Colonel Sanders face in the Nevada desert designed to be seen by satellite, and an Electrolux appliance suite aboard the Queen Mary 2. The kitchen had acquired ocean passage. The chocolate had acquired civic stature. The Colonel had acquired an altitude problem.

Those examples make an argument without a lecture. A product announcement asks people to receive information. A familiar monument transformed into a confection gives them an image to describe. Someone can tell the story over lunch without remembering a single line of corporate copy.

Scale helps, but scale alone would make this a rather expensive philosophy. The connection matters. The M&M spectacle belonged to a campaign about liberating your inner M&M; the appliance installation introduced European-designed products to North America. Each piece gave the brand a setting with something to say.

There is an agreeable absurdity to these assignments. Most of us encounter a household appliance when we need to replace one. Putting it on an ocean liner asks us to encounter it as news. Public relations, in this version, makes the ordinary temporarily unfamiliar enough to deserve a second look.

The creative route upstairs

In January 2013, Weber Shandwick named Heimann president and chief strategy officer. Her responsibility included working with practice leaders to develop the firm’s specialties, products and services. The assignment joined creative judgment to the organization around it: deciding what an agency should be equipped to offer, and helping its people deliver.

That distinction matters in a business that sells other people’s time and thinking. An idea may fit on a napkin. Making it happen requires teams, specialist knowledge, client confidence and the patience to solve problems the napkin did not anticipate. Promotion enlarges the list of people whose decisions affect the result.

She became CEO in July 2019. Around that period, more than 40 percent of the agency’s revenue came from work outside traditional PR and communications counsel, including digital, creative and data-led services. The figure describes the business at the time, rather than a current revenue mix. It shows how much the agency’s working definition of public relations had already expanded.

There was personal recognition too. PRWeek honored her as its U.S. and Global Agency Professional of the Year in 2019. Campaign’s Head of PR Agency award followed in January 2020. Awards compress a long run of decisions into a ceremony; the more revealing question is what colleagues learned while those decisions were being made.

Katie Welch, the Rare Beauty marketing executive, later described learning strategic storytelling from Heimann through instruction and by watching her in client work and pitches. Welch’s account starts with understanding the business objective, then finding the strategy and the communications that serve it. That order is easy to reverse when a team has a dazzling new tactic to sell.

Watching somebody think can be an education of its own. A junior colleague sees which question comes first, which detail changes the conversation, and when a clever proposal fails to address the problem. The lesson can travel to another company long after the original presentation has been filed away.

Three tests for an idea

As president of the Cannes Lions PR jury in 2021, Heimann helped establish a manifesto for judging work. Its criteria joined a connecting narrative, values that add value, and a central idea capable of earning attention across channels. A trophy submission had to answer several questions at once.

It is a useful set of restraints. A campaign can be wonderfully visible and still leave its audience with very little. It can express admirable values without finding a form anyone will notice. It can succeed in one format and turn into decorative noise everywhere else. The criteria ask the work to survive all three difficulties.

During her leadership, the agency’s work included The Climate Store for Swedish food brand Felix, a pop-up that priced products according to their carbon dioxide equivalent. It took first place among campaigns in PRovoke’s 2021 Global Creative Index. The mechanism turned an environmental abstraction into the familiar act of comparing prices.

A price tag is a small stage, but people know what to do with it. They compare, hesitate, choose. That gives the campaign a practical grammar. It also shows why the spectacle in Heimann’s career should not obscure the underlying craft. An idea can be physically large or fit on a shelf. Its job is to make a relationship legible.

The numbers nobody frames

The agency also had a less flattering set of numbers to discuss. In July 2020, Weber Shandwick released U.S. workforce diversity data showing that white employees held 88.9 percent of executive vice president roles and above, compared with 75 percent of positions categorized as professionals. Representation narrowed toward the top.

Heimann acknowledged that the workforce did not reflect the agency’s stated values. Publishing the figures created a benchmark against which future change could be measured. A communications company was putting a gap between its language and its organization into public view.

Disclosure does not itself repair the gap. Its value lies in making a comfortable conversation harder to maintain. Once the numbers are visible, the company’s account of itself has something concrete to answer to. The difference between aspiration and composition becomes available for discussion.

Her industry involvement also included The LAGRANT Foundation, which supports people from underrepresented groups entering advertising, marketing and public relations. She was the keynote speaker for its 2017 scholarship event in Detroit; Weber Shandwick hosted a career workshop for recipients. Access to a profession has practical parts: meeting people, seeing the work and learning how to apply.

What the machines cannot settle

In Lisbon at Web Summit in 2019, Heimann examined whether the pursuit of relentless efficiency was sustaining or threatening humanity. She also joined Burger King’s Fernando Machado and Lamborghini’s Katia Bassi in a discussion of marketing’s future. The questions reached beyond which tool would make the next campaign faster.

By a 2024 Cannes roundtable, she was discussing generative AI, the ways algorithms shape culture, and the need for colleagues to learn how to work with machines. Her concern connected cultural understanding with technical fluency. People making communications would need to understand the systems through which those communications travel.

The question of judgment remains. Faster production increases the number of things a team can make; it does not decide which thing deserves to exist. That decision still involves the audience, the business problem and the consequences of getting the relationship wrong. Efficiency offers an answer about means. Somebody has to supply the purpose.

“But none of it delivers without the idea at the center.”

Gail Heimann, 2020

Her stated leadership approach put listening, curiosity and attention to people alongside operational discipline. New technologies could help find insights, engage audiences and measure results. She kept returning to the idea that earns attention. The insistence gives her career a thread from the oversized consumer stunt to the much less photogenic management conversation.

A different kind of next chapter

Heimann’s retirement was announced in July 2024, with Susan Howe named to succeed her later that year. After a 28-year career at the firm, she said she planned to continue board work, advocate for women in business and marginalized populations, pursue her interest in the arts, and write a book. Those were plans, with their possibilities still ahead.

Her public account of creativity includes smaller pleasures. In a 2015 interview, she singled out early mornings with her pugs as a good time for reflection, and joked about their support for her ideas. She also recommended immersion in art, music, science and technology. The person developing an idea needed a life beyond the assignment.

There is a nice economy to the image of the pugs. They provide an audience before the client, the colleagues and the judges arrive. No revenue forecast, no scorecard, no request for a revised deck. Even a career spent competing for attention can make room for a few minutes when attention asks very little in return.

Then the work begins again: deciding what is interesting, whom it serves, and how to give it a form people can recognize. Sometimes that form is a chocolate statue in a harbor. Sometimes it is a question that a colleague remembers years later. Both give us a way to understand the choices Heimann carried through her career.