CEO of the MEC Group, Michelle Meyjes, was honoured by the media industry as the MOST Awards 2103 Media Agency Legend. NAB Caxton’s Gill Randall took top honours as the MOST Media Owner Legend.
Media Agency Legend
“It’s about f%&*ing time!” said one of the guests at the 2103 MOST Awards, running up to Media Agency Legend winner, Michelle Meyjes, and hugging her fiercely. The legendary Meyjes says her road to success was paved with “bloody hard work”. And, she says, having the right team around her.
“Passion, enthusiasm, initiative and a strong work ethic is what I look for,” she says. “People who are prepared to take time to build substance, to build depth. If it’s shallow, it won’t last. And if people think they can come into the industry without putting in the work, they’ll be out quickly too,” she says.
Meyjes says many youngsters coming into the media agency business don’t understand how hard work is the basis for success. They want instant gratification, she says. “It’s a hard lesson to teach,” she says. “My own daughter tells me doesn’t want a life like mine, that it’s so much hard work!”
While daughter Bianca might not follow in Meyjes’ footsteps, in an interview with editor of The Media magazine, Peta Krost Maunder, she said, “Books could be written about Mom. Learn to laugh if you’re around her, throw ‘can’t’ out of your vocabulary and leave your airs and graces at home. Bullshitters stand little chance and colourful characters are rewarded with love and warmth. Know she can clean a pool and sweep the floors as well as she can command a board room. It has to be said that before business, she’s always been a mom and, at that, one of my dearest of friends.”
Media Owner Legend
Randall, who is joint managing director of NAB with colleague John Bowles, already has one ‘big sheep’ award on her desk. Now she will have a pair of them after her peers voted her the MOST Awards Media Owner Legend of 2013. She believes her success is due to an “understanding of the broader view”.
“Yes, we’re involved in the media. But it is only one component of the bigger picture,” she says. To offer advertisers the best service, Randall says you have to understand their business and the mindset of the consumers who buy the advertisers’ products or services. “You have to take a holistic view, look at the big picture, see how all the components work, get an understanding of the discipline,” she says.
Research is key, she says, as is adding value to advertising clients’ businesses. “What make people buy the products the do and how can your media play a part in that?” she says.
It’s about relationships, says Randall, but more than that, the relationship must be built on intelligence and knowledge.
This is something Bowles points to in the piece he wrote on Randall for The Media magazine. She’s the “queen of EQ (emotional quotient), he says. ”
The guys in the office thought of this more as a girly thing. I, however, have to concede that Gill can read the emotions of people and somehow always manage to turn them into a positive outcome. She is a true artist of self-motivation. This is one of her strengths or positive traits – along with her ability to negotiate, close the sale, build relationships, get trashed, smoke a carton like Marlon Brando and generally live by the key rule of ‘work hard but play harder’.”
