Lisa Sherman once wanted to be John Madden. She knew the players, could spot the penalties and watched football until the last down on Sunday night. There was one small obstacle to a career in commentary: the Philadelphia Eagles could upset her rather more than professional detachment allowed. Advertising eventually got her. Football kept visiting rights.
The ambition is an appealing clue to the person behind the title. Sherman likes teams, pays attention to how people work together and has made a career of giving audiences a reason to care. Today, as president and CEO of the Ad Council, she gathers people who usually compete for attention and asks them to spend some of it on a shared cause. Her working materials are familiar: stories, relationships, research and the occasional bear in a ranger hat.
Look backward through her career and the same question keeps appearing. Who gets heard? At a telephone company, it was a question she had to answer for herself. At Logo TV, it concerned an audience that television had rarely addressed on its own terms. At the Ad Council, it becomes a public question: how can a message reach people with enough credibility to make them reconsider something?
A Saturday job with a long afterlife
Before the boardrooms came her father’s shoe store in Philadelphia. Sherman worked there as a teenager and watched him put customers at ease. Later, at Dickinson College, she studied psychology with an economics minor. She played basketball and lacrosse, captained the basketball team for two years and graduated in 1979. A teammate’s father pointed her toward a job at Bell of Pennsylvania. Personal connections were already doing useful work.
The store offers a modest beginning for someone whose eventual job would involve national audiences. It also gives the story a sensible scale. Communication starts with a person paying attention to another person. A customer has a reason for entering a shop; an audience has a reason for staying with a story. Neither owes the speaker unlimited patience. The interest has to be earned.
Telecommunications gave Sherman a corporate education. She rose through the business that became Verizon and held senior advertising and operating responsibilities. These were substantial jobs inside an established company, with the professional standing that comes from knowing how a large organization works. That standing makes what happened next more consequential. She had built a career there. Leaving meant giving up something real.
The conversation behind the case study
At a diversity workshop, Sherman heard colleagues express negative views about gay people. She was gay and had kept that part of her life private at work. She decided to leave the company and met with chief executive Ray Smith to explain what she had experienced. Smith subsequently took action within the business and testified before Congress on the issue. Her experience became a Harvard Business School case.
The uncomfortable detail is the setting: a workshop intended to address diversity. A company can create an occasion for inclusion without creating the conditions for it. Sherman’s account gives that gap a human cost. A successful executive could be trusted with company responsibilities while feeling unable to let colleagues know an ordinary fact about her life.
Years later, she described how much effort hiding had required, and how coming out allowed her to do better work. That recollection belongs in any account of her leadership. It makes inclusion a practical matter as well as a moral one. People bring limited attention to a job. Requiring them to spend some of it managing a secret is an expensive way to run an organization.
She has also been candid about a different risk: starting a business that eventually closed. She co-founded the Women’s Sports Network, a marketing company connecting brands with women and girls through sport. The venture gave her a chance to build around an audience she cared about. Its ending remains part of the account she offers emerging leaders. A career can contain a failed company and still carry its lessons forward.
“Find what scares you and take that risk.”
Lisa Sherman, 2019 Matrix Awards
A channel that made room
After a senior role at Hill Holliday, Sherman moved into television. At Viacom, she helped launch and lead Logo TV, which began broadcasting in 2005 for LGBTQ audiences. Her job was to help make an audience into a functioning media business. That required the less glamorous companions of a creative idea: budgets, operations, partnerships and the work of keeping an organization moving.
A channel has to fill a schedule. Viewers have to find it and choose to return. Advertisers have to understand whom they are reaching. Representation depends on these ordinary commercial arrangements, which is why an operating executive belongs in the story of cultural change. A good intention becomes more useful when someone can build a business around it.
Logo also had to keep listening. In 2012, its research with Starcom MediaVest examined the varied interests and everyday lives of LGBTQ viewers. Sherman discussed the importance of programming that reflected the breadth of those lives. The audience wanted entertainment that recognized more than a single identity. The research made room for complexity where a demographic label could have encouraged a shortcut.
That is a useful complication in the usual story about serving an overlooked audience. Recognition is a beginning. Afterward come individual tastes, changing habits and disagreements about what to watch tonight. Logo’s programming decisions were commercial decisions, too. Sherman worked at that intersection until 2014, when another institution offered her a different way to combine communications with purpose.
What a pair of skeletons can say
Sherman joined the Ad Council in November 2014. She later described the invitation as an immediate recognition that her media and marketing experience could serve the kind of work she wanted to do. The job brought together people and skills accumulated across corporate advertising, entrepreneurship and television. It gave her those familiar tools with a different destination.
One early campaign was Love Has No Labels. Its 2015 film used a large screen to show skeletons embracing and dancing before revealing the people behind them. The setup postponed the audience’s assumptions. Affection arrived first; identities followed. People watching had already responded to the relationship before being asked to think about the labels they might attach to it.
R/GA created the work pro bono. The film was recorded in Santa Monica on Valentine’s Day, and by February 2016 the Ad Council reported more than 160 million views. It is an instructive example of the kind of persuasion Sherman helps organize. The creative team trusted a visual idea to hold attention, and allowed the reveal to carry the argument.
The credit belongs to a coalition. Sherman leads an institution that brings together issue experts, creative agencies and media partners. Each contributes something the others need. Experts understand the subject; agencies develop the communication; media partners help people encounter it. The chief executive has to keep that arrangement working, including the relationships that survive beyond a single campaign.
Views reported for the original Love Has No Labels film by February 2016. A historical reach figure, rather than a count of changed minds.
Views show how far a film traveled. Evaluating persuasion requires another question: what happened afterward? In a 2017 interview, Sherman described setting campaign measures with partners at the beginning and tracking progress over time. Some campaigns run for years. That patience can sit awkwardly beside the advertising business’s appetite for a fresh launch, but public habits rarely change on an awards calendar.
The work between the names
The Ad Council’s model puts relationships to work at national scale. Nonprofit and government partners contribute expertise and campaign funding; agencies contribute creative work; media organizations provide donated space and time. Production and coordination still need resources. The resulting advertisement may look effortless. The arrangement behind it is anything but.
There is a small irony in leading an organization whose messages can be more recognizable than its name. Sherman has talked about raising the Ad Council’s own profile. The point is practical: partners and supporters need to understand the institution assembling the work. Even a business devoted to other people’s messages occasionally has to explain its own.
Her approach to corporate partnerships includes scrutiny. When the Ad Council began expanding its work with brands, Sherman spoke about finding issues connected to a company’s existing commitments and checking whether its conduct supported the association. A public message asks for trust. The companies around it become part of the evidence an audience uses to decide whether that trust is deserved.
Relationships also appear in her life away from campaign production. She and communications executive Sally Susman have been friends for more than three decades and have sought each other’s professional advice. At a Dickinson women’s luncheon in 2018, Sherman spoke about the influence people can gain by supporting one another. Her emphasis was on creating those circles of support, especially for people who might otherwise stand alone.
A bear, a band and the next call
Recognition followed: a Matrix Award in 2019, the American Marketing Association Foundation’s national Nonprofit Marketer of the Year award in 2020, and a place on Fast Company’s 2021 creative people list. In April 2025, she entered the American Advertising Federation’s Advertising Hall of Fame. The sequence records a career moving across industries while retaining an interest in what communication can accomplish.
The less formal details are more entertaining. Asked to choose between Smokey Bear and McGruff the Crime Dog in 2018, Sherman chose Smokey. Her imagined alternative career remains football commentary. And her dream campaign involves musicians joining forces on a song about coming together. In the 2025 Hall of Fame program, she imagined Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande helping assemble it. Even her wish list requires a coalition.
There is current work to organize, too. In July 2026, the Ad Council announced that General Motors chair and CEO Mary Barra would be honored at its December public service dinner. Sherman welcomed the decision and connected business leadership with public purpose. The calendar keeps offering occasions to bring people into the same room and ask what they can do together.
At Dickinson’s 2021 commencement, she urged graduates to prepare for change and used the image of buildings designed to sway. Her own record gives the advice substance: corporate executive, co-founder, television operator, nonprofit chief. The settings change. Her interest in people, and in the conditions that let them contribute, remains visible.
A football commentator helps an audience see how a play develops. Sherman’s actual job asks her to help build the play: find the partners, understand the audience, make the message and give it somewhere to land. The Eagles may still test her composure. The larger team has work to do.