Mandrake

THE PLAYER
Stefan Danis often knows more about what’s going on at ad shops than their own presidents -and that’s making some people very uncomfortable

By Lara Mills
Marketing Magazine
April 30, 2001

It's early afternoon on the punishing day after the 2001 Marketing Awards Gala when I arrive, still a little groggy, at the spanking-new Toronto headquarters of Mandrake Management Consultants. For someone who claims to have been "peeled off the floor" of Roy Thomson Hall the night before, Stefan Danis, Mandrake's 37-year-old president and CEO, is looking pretty good–OK, like he just walked out of GQ–when he comes to greet me. It's not difficult to see how he pulled off the knight-in-shining-armour getup (white steed included) that he donned to propose to his wife.

The general buzz about the office belies the fact that many of Mandrake's staff partied, post-show, till the wee hours at Toronto's Left Bank nightclub. A client from Microsoft is on his way up for a meeting, and a handful of headhunters–or consultants, in the parlance of the place–are milling restlessly around a boardroom table as they await the arrival of their guest of honour.

Back in the foyer, Danis is about to give me a tour when consultant James Coburn strides across the earth-toned expanse boasting a wad of 41 business cards he'd gathered the night before. Coburn's impressive haul appears to put him in second place in the company's card-collection challenge (Dave Smith, vice-president of Mandrake's digital practice, scored 47).

The testosterone hangs heavy in the air, and out of it floats a reference to the best verbal gaffe from last night's awards presentation: when John Terry, senior art director at BBDO Canada, upon accepting the last of four Gold trophies for the agency's work on DaimlerChrysler Canada's Jeep brand, clearly intended to thank the "unsung heroes" of the business–the account folks. Instead, though, he referred to his colleague, Gary King, as an "unhung zero."

"We checked our records," Coburn announces, "and Gary King is, in fact, well-hung."

For just a moment–whether because of Coburn's swagger or a lingering hangover–I wonder if he's joking. After all, Mandrake is a company that trades in information. It's even been said that Danis himself–having worked as a marketing-industry recruiter for close to 15 years–tends to know more about what's going on at an advertising agency than that same shop's president does. (He doesn't dispute this.)

But while agency execs' endowments probably aren't included in Mandrake's ever-growing database, it's safe to say that many other tasty tidbits are. Like who's unhappy in their job. Or who might be open to a change. This kind of information is gold to Mandrake's customers, and it's added to every time one of them calls. And this information–specifically, the way it's been used–is also what has landed the company at the centre of controversy within ad agency circles.

To be sure, being a headhunter isn't easy. Unless one is concentrating on the highest echelons of the business world at a global executive-search firm, recruiters tend to have a reputation as "flesh peddlers." Alan Middleton, a professor of marketing at the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto, calls search companies in the Canadian marketing business "a necessary evil."

Recruiting is also something people fall into by accident, as Danis himself did in the mid-1980s. He was 22 and fresh from a brief stint at Procter & Gamble when he joined Mandrake, a company formed in 1970 by Harold Perry through the merger of the search firms Manpower and Drake. Having recently moved from his home in Montreal, where he'd studied finance at McGill University, Danis had planned to stick it out for six months, make some contacts in Toronto and then move on. But he loved it.

"This is one of the very, very few places where you get to sit down for an hour with someone," Danis says, "and if you're good at what you do, people will be vulnerable and they will share themselves, as to what they want to do. You're an enabler. You can help them get to where they want to go."

When Danis arrived, Mandrake had a staff of about 10 and had carved out a "leadership position" in packaged-goods marketing with clients such as Quaker Oats and Cadbury Beverages. Though he was young and without much of a career track record, Danis started working with "kids" like himself–first on the marketer side of the business and then, about a year later, among ad agencies."

In time, I had a nose for picking talent pretty early on," Danis says. And as those "kids"–among them Howard Breen, now director of mergers and acquisitions for Young & Rubicam North America and chairman of the agency's Chicago office; John Clinton, president and CEO of Grey Worldwide in Toronto; and Gerry Frascione, president and CEO of Toronto-based Wolf Group–rose in their careers, so did Danis. He was named president two-and-a-half years ago, while Perry remains as chair.

Today, Mandrake has roughly 80 people in offices in Toronto, Montreal and Calgary, and its clients run the gamut from ad agencies, interactive shops and other marketing-services firms to broadcasters, associations and a vast array of marketers. Personnel searches are still, far and away, the largest part of Mandrake's business, but the company now provides other services as well, such as mergers and acquisitions consulting. Peter Shier, president of Harrod & Mirlin/FCB in Toronto, who has worked with Danis for years, used him informally as a sounding board during his agency's recent–and often difficult–restructuring.

But it is Mandrake's agency-search service that has proven most controversial. While the company has been doing this both formally and informally since 1989–when it assisted Crayola in an agency review–these days it's a topic around which Danis treads gingerly. And that may be because, to Mandrake's critics, the fact that the company is involved in both the people-search business with agencies and the agency-search business with advertisers is a conflict of interest. The Institute of Canadian Advertising–which offers its own agency-search service–has, since learning of the practice, condemned it, albeit carefully."

There is a potential for Mandrake or any recruitment firms to have a significant conflict of interest if they are also engaged in agency search and selection," says Rupert Brendon, president and CEO of the ICA, in a statement prepared in response to a query by Marketing. "First, it is unethical and shortly to become illegal (thanks to new privacy legislation that came into effect in January) to gather information for one purpose and, without prior consent, use it for another purpose. Agencies using any recruitment firm will inevitably give them much confidential internal information to make it easier to recruit personnel, expecting that that alone is how the information will be used. If the recruitment firm turns around and uses that confidential information to aid an advertiser in agency selection, that is plain wrong in ICA's opinion and we have told Mandrake so. They do not accept ICA's view and so we must agree to disagree, and people will make their own conclusion."

Danis defends Mandrake's involvement in agency searches as a legitimate extension of its business: "There are no real proprietary processes, manufacturing technology or anything that distinguishes one agency from the next at the end of the day," he says. "You usually buy culture and people–and a client list. So a search firm is a pretty good vehicle to assess what you're buying... Advertisers are always asking who's good, who's doing good work."

He adds that Mandrake has never promoted its agency-search service, doesn't "recommend against" agencies and tries to disclose "as little as possible" whenever a marketer wants advice. In addition, Danis says he's never had any complaints from agencies. "We might be refurbishing information and selling it, in people's eyes," he says. "But all we do is give opportunities for agencies to enter a dialogue. We're not there to screen them out."

Even so, the ICA questions Mandrake's neutrality. "The other potential conflict," Brendon continues, "is that some advertising agencies have quite large retainer recruitment contracts with Mandrake, and others do not. Again, there is a potential conflict of interest that advertisers should be aware of, unless Mandrake declares up front which agencies they act for in this manner."

Indeed, whether or not Mandrake only couches its recommendations in the positive, the result is still that some agencies are chosen over others. One recent case does raise questions: Caroline Breton, manager of corporate communications and strategies at Microsoft Canada (and, as Mandrake's detractors love to point out, Danis' ex-wife), turned to Mandrake for help last year when the software giant was looking for a new agency. Microsoft hired Publicis Canada. Then Publicis tapped Mandrake for its recruitment savvy when the agency began staffing up to service the $25-million account (which has since moved to MacLaren McCann as part of a global realignment earlier this year).

Whether or not this is all just happenstance–Publicis is not one of Mandrake's retainer clients, and Andrew Bruce, the agency's executive VP and chief operating officer, says it simply made sense to hire Mandrake for recruitment because Mandrake knows Microsoft–it has left a bitter taste. Mike Fyshe, the ex-president and CEO of BBDO Canada, feels that his former shop was not included on the Microsoft short list because BBDO doesn't work with Mandrake. "Agency searches, to me," Fyshe says, "do not belong with recruiters."

Danis argues that Publicis was just one of six shops Mandrake introduced to Microsoft, which decided on its own who to meet. "I think we have the privilege of knowing more about our customers than we know about our non-customers, so I'll grant that," Danis says. "It's factual that we might be more powerful an ambassador and certainly, you could argue, more passionate. But our job is to help the customer–which in this case was Microsoft–find the best solution."

He adds that in any agency search, Mandrake always discloses to the advertiser which agencies it works with for recruitment: "We would never want them to, after the fact, think that there may have been a conflict of interest. So we're very up front about that."

Even so, Danis is actively trying to distance Mandrake from agency searches. The company is helping Wendy Robertson, former director of planning and development at Enterprise Creative Selling in Toronto, launch Rebuilt, a relationship-counselling-cum-search service for marketers that are having issues with their agency partners.

"It's all about enriching the current relationship," Danis says. "Now, if it's terminal, there's nothing we can do about it. Then Rebuilt would lead the agency review, which should make the ICA really happy."

For Danis, the kerfuffle over his company's involvement in agency searches seems an unwelcome distraction from his main goal: building Mandrake into more than just another "flesh peddling" firm.

The company is continually expanding beyond marketing recruitment–perhaps because, on the ad agency side of the business at least, it's grown as much as it can. Any search firm can really only have retainer agreements with about a third of the companies in a market so it's still able to recruit from the rest. (Some of Mandrake's contracts prohibit it from even taking calls from individuals within client companies.)

Mandrake is also, in a sense, "giving back" to the community that's contributed to its success. Since 1991, it has organized the annual Skate for Kids celebrity hockey tournament, which raises money for several charities, including the National Advertising Benevolent Society. In addition, Andrew Lindsay has come on board as director of brand Mandrake, responsible for building the company's image.

What Danis envisions down the road is a sort of "talent agent" setup, where Mandrake would tap the best and brightest at the start of their careers and, for a small portion of their earnings, guide them as they climb the corporate ladder. This sort of thing is already underway in the company's "Destiny ME" career-management service, which offers career counselling to individuals outside of specific job opportunities.

Like his mentor Harold Perry, Danis has many fans in the marketing business. Grey's Clinton describes Danis as "very bright, very committed." And both Brian Mirsky, president and CEO of Campbell Soup, and Michael Downey, senior VP of global marketing at Molson Canada, say Mandrake has brought excellent candidates to their respective tables. In Molson's case, these have included marketing luminaries such as Rob Guenette, Andrew Barrett, Brett Marchand and, well, Downey himself.

Even Anne Kothawala, president and CEO of the Canadian Newspaper Association in Toronto, says that while things got off to a "shaky start" after Mandrake was tapped to help the CNA in its ongoing search for a VP of marketing, things improved as soon as Danis himself stepped up to the plate.

Fellow executive search consultant Richard Foster, president of The Richard Foster Company in Toronto, however, reserves his kindest words for Perry. "Like him or hate him, he's always been one hell of an adversary." As for Mandrake under Danis, Foster hopes the company keeps doing exactly what it's been doing. "They're the type of competitors I'd want to have as competitors. I wouldn't want them to change."

There's little chance of that. However you look at it, Danis brings a passion to his job that seems to grow out of his passion for life. He windsurfs. He heli-skis. And he loves telling the tale of how he dressed up as a knight and rode a horse through Toronto's tony Yorkville neighbourhood flanked by 40 followers to propose to his wife, Leslie, managing partner of the marketing consultancy GenderMark International. (The two married a year ago at the foot of a mountain in Whistler, B.C., where 70 snow-covered guests stood waiting as they skied down. They're expecting their first child in June.)

I remark that he doesn't seem to do anything halfway. "No, why?" Danis replies, without skipping a beat. And that drive, that energy, would seem to bode well for anyone who walks through Mandrake's door. "Your ability to earn an income and have a career is your second most important aspect after your mental and physical health, and we're in that business," Danis says. "It's a tremendous honour."

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