Mark Penn
Mark J. Penn is an American businessman, pollster, political strategist, and author.
Penn is chairman and chief executive officer of Stagwell, a marketing group. He was formerly chief strategy officer of Microsoft Corporation and chief executive officer of Burson-Marsteller. Penn is the author of the books Microtrends and Microtrends Squared.
Together with Douglas Schoen, he was co-founder of the polling firm PSB Research, whose clients included President Bill Clinton, British prime minister Tony Blair, and Bill Gates. Penn was a chief strategist and pollster in the Hillary Clinton 2008 presidential campaign. Penn later became a defender of Donald Trump, opposing his impeachment, reportedly consulting on his 2020 presidential campaign, and alleging a "deep state" conspiracy against him.
Early life and education
Penn was born in New York City and raised in Riverdale. His father, a Lithuanian immigrant, was a kosher poultry-plant owner, who died when Penn was 10 years old. He was raised by his mother Blanche, who worked as a schoolteacher. Both of his brothers credit Penn with keeping the family together after their father's death. Penn graduated from Horace Mann School in Riverdale in 1972. He conducted his first poll, which determined that the Horace Mann faculty was more liberal than was the country at large on the issue of civil rights, when he was 13, as well as polling classmates about sex and drugs.Penn entered Harvard University in 1972. According to his brother, Penn was initially rejected, but he was able to get Harvard's dean to reverse the decision after taking the train to Boston and arguing his case. At Harvard, Penn majored in political science and, as a city editor of the Harvard Crimson, wrote and reported 90 articles. His work for the paper included reporting and analysis on buying a stereo, the Cambridge City Council elections of 1975, the Harvard admission process, and the controversy over the proposed construction in Cambridge of the John F. Kennedy Library. With Doug Schoen, who he attended Horace Mann School with, Penn co-founded Penn & Schoen – now the global market research firm Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates – in their dorm room. He graduated from Harvard in 1976.*
Early political campaigns
Ed Koch mayoral campaign of 1977 and 1985
While Penn was a first-year law student at Columbia University in 1976, he and his business partner Douglas Schoen became the pollsters for congressman Ed Koch's second run for mayor of New York City. In 1977, with the campaign against Mario Cuomo for the Democratic nomination in full swing, Penn sought a way to conduct polls more quickly than the mainframe and punched card system he and Schoen were making use of at Columbia University. He purchased a self-assembled "microcomputer" kit and created a program that could compile polls in a fraction of the time than had been done before. By creating this "overnight poll" system, Penn allowed the campaign to conduct polls to determine messages and evaluate tactics on a daily basis, a tactical advantage that contributed to Koch's eventual victory over Cuomo.Penn also played a significant role in Koch's campaign during the 1985 New York City mayoral election, for which he and Schoen developed direct mailings, set up phone banks, organized volunteers and canvassers, and coordinated fundraising. That year, Koch won both the Democratic primary and the general election, defeating New York City Council President Carol Bellamy.
Luis Herrera Campins presidential campaign of 1978 and Latin American politics
In 1978, Penn conducted polling for the presidential campaign of Luis Herrera Campins in Venezuela. Because Venezuela did not at that time have universal phone coverage, Penn partnered with Venezuelan polling firms to go door-to-door to collect interviews. He also helped the campaign develop the slogan "Ya Basta," or "Enough," critical of the incumbent party's spending policies. Herrera carried the election by about 3%.The election marked the beginning of Penn's successful involvement in Latin American politics. Since 1979, Penn's firm has helped elect more than a half dozen heads of state in Latin America, including Venezuela's Carlos Andrés Pérez, Belisario Betancur and Virgilio Barco Vargas of Colombia, and Leonel Fernández of the Dominican Republic.
Menachem Begin 1981 campaign for prime minister
In 1981, Penn & Schoen conducted polling for Menachem Begin's campaign for re-election as Prime Minister of Israel. When Begin called Penn in January 1981, public polling for the June parliamentary election showed that Begin's party, Likud, would lose the elections by a margin of 58 seats for the rival Labor Party to 20 seats for Begin's Likud party. A New York Times article published in March of that year stated that Begin was "probably in his final months as Prime Minister." Penn & Schoen applied the rapid polling techniques they had developed on Ed Koch's first campaign for mayor to provide Begin with a daily understanding of attitudes of the Israeli electorate. Ultimately, Begin defeated Labor, led by Shimon Peres, by 10,405 votes out of more than 1.5 million cast.Corporate work
In the late 1980s, Penn was the force behind his firm's drive to win corporate consulting clients. Texaco, which was experiencing image problems due to bankruptcy after the Pennzoil v. Texaco court case, was the firm's first major corporate client.In 1993, Penn, Schoen & Berland was engaged by AT&T's new advertising agency FCB to guide a response to the "Friends and Family" plan offered by MCI, a then-upstart competitor for AT&T's long-distance services. To help AT&T understand how best to counter MCI's strongest messages, Penn created the "mall testing" methodology for competitive advertising research. In the mall tests, Penn showed randomly selected mall shoppers MCI ads head-to-head with proposed new AT&T ads. Using this methodology, Penn's firm determined messages resulting in AT&T's "True" plan and its $200 million advertising campaign. As a result of this campaign, by the end of 1994, AT&T had signed up 14 million new long-distance customers.
Penn has been a strategic advisor to Bill Gates and Microsoft since the mid-1990s. Penn began working with Microsoft when the company faced antitrust litigation initiated by the U.S. Department of Justice. Penn also created the famous "blue sweater" advertisement that featured Gates, which were intended to restore trust in the company amid the antitrust litigation. In 2006, a survey of global opinion leaders found that Microsoft was the world's most trusted company, an accomplishment which The Wall Street Journal partially attributed to Penn's advice.
His other corporate clients have included Ford Motor Company, Merck & Co., Verizon, BP, and McDonald's.
Microsoft Corporation
In July 2012, Penn was named Corporate Vice President for Strategic and Special Projects at Microsoft Corporation. Shortly after he came on board, he began a public relations campaign against Google on behalf of Bing. Just in time for the holiday shopping season, he created a commercial in which Microsoft criticized Google for biasing its shopping search results with paid advertisements. "Don't get Scroogled", the commercial warned. In August 2013, Penn was named Executive Vice President for Advertising and Strategy. In that role, he pioneered Microsoft's "Honestly" campaignand the award-winning Super Bowl 2014 ad "Empowering Us All". In March 2014, he was named executive vice president and chief strategy officer by chief executive officer Satya Nadella. On June 17, 2015, it was announced he would be leaving Microsoft.
The Stagwell Group
After leaving Microsoft, Penn founded The Stagwell Group, a private equity firm that invests in marketing services agencies with a $250 million investment from former Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer.In May 2016, Penn told The Wall Street Journal that he wanted to create a "more digitally-focused advertising holding group, made up of companies which do not overlap in function," and offer a "fully-integrated solution across the continuum of marketing services." In 2023, Penn stated that his "political background brings a much-needed perspective to marketing." He described his philosophy as that in today's real-time, data-focused world, brands must have a constant finger on the pulse of the American consumer.
In October 2015, Stagwell Group struck a deal worth up to $75 million to buy SKDKnickerbocker. In January 2017, the Stagwell Group acquired the Harris Poll from Nielsen Holdings and renamed it Harris Insights & Analytics. The firm has also acquired National Research Group, digital creative firm Code and Theory, media agency ForwardPMX, and marketing communications companies SKDK and Targeted Victory, among others.