An advertising vet of 20+ years, Kristin Barbour has worked with some of the world’s most prestigious brands, including McDonald’s for more than a decade, as well as Kraft, Mars/Wrigley, ConAgra Brands and Chevrolet.
Her success on every account has been fueled by inspiring innovative, brand-building ideas and assembling and motivating unstoppable teams that win.
There is no doubt that Kristin’s competitive fire to win was fueled when she was recruited to join the scrappy DDB Chicago pitch team whose mission was clear: steal back the McDonald’s account from Leo Burnett. Being a key member of the small historic winning team that included industry legends was a career-defining moment that led to more than a decade of opportunities for Kristin to demonstrate U.S. and global brand leadership.
From some of the most successful new product launches in McDonald’s history: Premium Salads, McGriddles and McCafe, to being part of the team that designed and executed the back-to-basics global turnaround plan that drove unprecedented U.S. growth for nearly a decade.
Kristin closed out her McDonald’s tenure leading and executing the global activation of “i’m lovin’ it!”, the company’s longest-running campaign that earned McDonald’s Ad Age’s Marketer of the Year.
Kristin was tapped to run the North American ConAgra Brands account for DDB in 2010 and in a few short years guided her team to an extraordinary organic win, shifting the client’s agency model from five rostered agencies to one consolidated DDB partnership. Her team’s work on Slim Jim earned ConAgra its debut at Cannes.
Kristin was tapped to join Camp + King in the Fall of 2017 to launch and lead the agency’s Chicago office with the strategic goal of establishing a presence for Camp + King to service clients east of the Rockies. Kristin led the winning pitch for Papa Johns as the brand was digging out of a reputational crisis driven by the former founder and CEO. The agency’s brand relaunch work was a springboard to the unprecedented business turnaround that followed and earned Camp + King AdAge’s Best Small Agency of the Year and Silver overall.
Let’s meet Kristin!
What’s your origin story?
I was a theater kid. Spending Saturdays auditioning and performing in the local children’s theater since elementary school. While I didn’t fully realize it then, it was at this budding age that I started to learn something important about myself: I felt the most alive and at home when I was around creative people.
In high school, when most teenagers were spending their summers looking for the best house party to crash, I spent a good chunk of my summer endeavoring to improve the quality of our local cable TV programming by teaming up with my best theater pals to create our own TV show called Moneyman. It told the story of a preppy superhero from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, who did everything in his power to keep the colorful social lives of young adult Grosse Pointers alive and free from the riff-raff and villains of neighboring suburbs.
I went on to college, feeding my creativity by performing in musical theater at Michigan and, as a Communications major, stumbled upon this thing called advertising, which appeared to be a brilliant, chaotic mash-up of solving business problems with creativity. I was hooked.
How did you get into advertising?
As a senior at Michigan, I took a “Writing for Advertising” class. The class was taught by a female ECD who worked at a small, creative shop in Ann Arbor that produced award-winning automotive work for The Big Three (Ford, Chevy, Chrysler). On the first day of class, she distributed an actual creative brief used at her agency and gave us creative assignments in teams of two.
I was obsessed with the class and remember wanting to focus all my energy on her creative advertising assignments. At the end of the course, I thanked her for giving me the most inspiring class I had taken at Michigan, and then I told her what she really needed was an intern!
She waited to make sure I wasn’t kidding, then told me to meet her at her office on Main Street at 8:00 am Monday morning. That self-seized internship gave me my first taste of agency life. It was love at first sight. From there, I landed my first job out of school at Campbell-Ewald in Detroit, working on the national Chevrolet Car & Truck business.
Who were your mentors?
I’ve always been inspired and in awe of women, I’ve been lucky enough to meet throughout my career who go to bat for and support other women. There are some women who I have come across in my career who work tirelessly to ‘build their own brand’ and talk the talk as a supporter of other women, but those aren’t the ones I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the real McCoys, who step out and are brave enough in a male-dominated industry to exhibit courage and make sacrifices for one another.
While there will be others, what do you consider your biggest achievement to date?
Working alongside industry greats on the historic advertising win as a young member of the scrappy DDB pitch team whose mission from God was to steal back the McDonald’s business from Leo Burnett and bring it home.
While I wasn’t senior enough to have played a significant role in the actual pitch, what I learned from the experience was career-defining and shaped what I now believe to be the tenants of building teams that win.
What drives you to create?
For me, it’s all about the people I surround myself with daily. I’ve been lucky enough to have had the opportunity to assemble teams who have done remarkable things. I learned from some of the best leaders I’ve known that it’s really not about you at all once you become the leader.
Adam Grant nailed it when he said, “The ability of the group to do remarkable things hinges on how well those people pull together as a team.” A former colleague of mine who moved into a senior marketing position at Dyson recently told me that when she was participating in a company management seminar, she referenced the culture of the team we built together during her agency days.
As she reflected on the incredible creative and business-driving success our team had achieved, she told me one of the reasons she thought we could win against all odds was because we were a team that felt like family. And I think that’s it. When a group feels safe and trusted, and their will to do their very best matches their will to have each other’s backs, they will be unstoppable.
Award you crave, but haven’t won
The Working Mother’s Award. But I’d like my three daughters to author the award and present it to me. No press acknowledgments are necessary! All kidding aside, I’ve spent years confirming that it’s nearly impossible to balance it all because there is no such thing as achieving the perfect balance.
I’ve learned that it’s not how many family dinners you all have together; it’s how great they are when you have them. You raise your kids to be strong, independent souls who can look at you and appreciate that their Mom gets to do something every day that she’s cuckoo bananas passionate about.
Ultimately, I know that is a lesson that will serve them well.
What shows/movies/songs are doing the best job of portraying strong women on TV?
Busy Phillips – specifically, Busy Phillips is Doing Her Best Podcast – because she is 100% exactly herself at all times. What a refreshing, inspiring, and achievable definition of feminine power, courage, and strength.
Is there still a boys club?
Sadly, yes. Please see below for what keeps me up at night.
Coffee, Lunch, or Happy Hour. Name a famous woman (living or dead) you would like to attend each function with
Coffee: Gloria Steneim
Lunch: Michelle Obama
Happy Hour: Lucille Ball
What keeps you up at night?
The disadvantage women still have in this industry compared to men. The gender pay gap is real, and we need to teach women how to negotiate for the salaries they deserve. We must hold companies accountable to create inclusive cultures for women and tackle the unconscious biases around career management and promotion.
Finally, the unsavory truth that nobody wants to talk about is that advertising still has a lot of work to do to overcome its sexist past. While the industry is credited for being progressive and creating work that supports gender equality, we still have a long way to go for women to feel that companies will draw a hard enough line against issues like sexual harassment and discrimination.
As a mother of three driven, independent young women, I cannot and will not let these issues lie.
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