In 2017, Kristen Cavallo and her son, Matt, then a student on spring break from James Madison University, set out to climb Mount Kilimanjaro with a seven-day window to summit.

Statistics from Kilimanjaro National Park, last updated in the 2000s, show a correlation between a route’s duration and success rate: Climbers on seven-day routes have a 66% chance of successfully summiting Africa’s highest mountain, while those on eight-day routes have an 84% success rate.

Their guide was National Geographic photographer Jake Norton, and Cavallo says, “Listening to his stories every night kind of took you away from feeling like your face was bloated,” she said, noting that during the climb, “somehow the inside of my lips got sunburned, and the back of … [my] ears were blistered.”

Cavallo and her son pushed through, eventually summiting at sunrise, a moment that both recollect with awe.

“There’s a lot I don’t remember, but I do remember he turned around and he had tears in his eyes and he gave me a huge hug,” Cavallo recalls. “And he’s like, ‘We did it, Mom.’ And it’s one of those moments where I’m like, ‘OK, I’m never forgetting that moment.’”

While the mother of two’s dedication to climbing the 19,340-foot mountain reflects the tenacity she brings to her career, the accelerated climb mirrors her professional rise to the top.

In her roughly five-year tenure as its CEO, Richmond-based advertising firm The Martin Agency has added a slew of major accounts, including Fortune 500 used car retailer CarMax and Fortune 1000 food delivery platform DoorDash. And top trade publications have named Martin ad agency of the year multiple times during the past three years.

In November 2022, Cavallo became global CEO for international marketing communications network MullenLowe Group while retaining her position as CEO for Martin, which shares a parent holding company, Interpublic Group of Cos. (IPG), with MullenLowe. She now has oversight of nearly 5,000 employees across 20 offices in 13 countries, including more than 400 workers at Martin.

And at a time when many corporations are backing away from diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, Cavallo has remained a visible industry champion for DEI.

In recognition of her business strategy and successes at the helm of Martin, and now MullenLowe Global, as an international leader in advertising and marketing, Virginia Business has named Cavallo its 2023 Business Person of the Year. 

Base camp

The middle child of a U.S. Army intelligence officer, Cavallo became accustomed to moving frequently, which, she says, prepared her for business leadership.

“I’m an Army brat,” says Cavallo, who has two brothers. “I’ve moved a lot in my life. I think fast on my feet. … I feel like the worst thing you can do for a company is be indecisive.”

She was fiercely competitive from a young age. While her father, the late Chuck Pflugrath, was stationed in Germany, Cavallo and her family would join volksmarches — noncompetitive fitness walks that often have awards or small prizes for finishers.

“It’s not a competitive walk, but to her, it was,” recalls Pete Pflugrath, her older brother by about 6 1/2 years. “She would be in front, basically shaming the rest of us about why we weren’t moving faster and making us realize there was a prize at the end, and we needed to get on with it.”

Cavallo’s father retired to Northern Virginia, where Cavallo finished high school before attending JMU. She graduated in 1991 with a degree in marketing. Cavallo was a role model, says Mike Pflugrath, her younger brother by a year: “She was confident enough in herself … that she didn’t have to be a follower with any type of [delinquent] behavior, but at the same time, she was popular and well-liked.”

That self-assurance and moral compass has stuck with Cavallo, according to Alex Leikikh, chairman of MullenLowe Group and executive vice president of IPG. Leikikh was part of the management team that hired Cavallo at Mullen in 2011, and one of her conditions for becoming Martin’s CEO was that she report directly to him.

“The thing I love about Kristen probably the most is … she asks neither for forgiveness nor permission. She just does what she thinks is right, and so far, she’s been pretty successful at it,” he says.

Ascent

Cavallo started her career building planograms — diagrams of product layouts on retail store shelves — for Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Clairol hair products, beginning in college. When she asked her boss if she could get a job in the Clairol marketing department based on her sales work, he answered she needed an MBA, so she went on to earn her MBA with a focus in statistics from George Mason University in 1993.

Cavallo says she “fell into advertising” in the ’90s while living in Boston and attending a networking event, which led to her getting an interview at what was then Mullen Advertising. When she stepped into its building, Cavallo recalls she “felt all the synapses in my brain just going off at once. It was fast-paced and fun and spontaneous. There was a sense of urgency to it that I loved.”

Cavallo joined Mullen in 1994 as a strategic planner. A year later, she jumped to Boston-based ad agency Arnold Worldwide, where she served as a senior strategic planner. In 1998, she joined Martin as a senior vice president and group planning director, moving up to director of business development in 2005, before returning to Mullen in 2011 as chief strategy officer. In 2014, she was named president of Mullen’s Boston office. Following IPG’s 2015 merger of Lowe and Partners with Mullen, Cavallo became MullenLowe Group’s U.S. chief strategy and growth officer.

On Dec. 12, 2017, IPG named Cavallo as Martin’s first female CEO, replacing then-CEO Matt Williams.

“I was not interviewing to be the CEO. I was asked to be the CEO, and I had about 20 hours to prepare,” Cavallo says, describing herself as a reluctant, but not unqualified, chief executive.

Cavallo took over at Martin in the wake of highly publicized sexual harassment allegations against Martin’s former chief creative officer, Joe Alexander, who left the ad agency less than two weeks before Cavallo was named CEO. (Alexander, who has denied the allegations and any wrongdoing, filed a $50.4 million-plus lawsuit against Martin, alleging defamation, breach of contract and other claims. As of early November, a jury trial was scheduled for Feb. 20, 2024, in Richmond Circuit Court, although a hearing was set for mid-December over the defendants’ motion to dismiss the claims.)

“The agency was in crisis for various reasons,” says Martin Chief Strategy Officer Elizabeth Paul. “A lot of that was because of He Who Shall Not Be Named, but also the agency shrunk a lot in the years that she was gone.”

The morale at Martin, was “fear, anger, nervousness — that might have just been me,” minus the anger, Cavallo says.

Cavallo embarked on a series of significant policy changes.

“I definitely couldn’t hide,” she says. “Either I was there as a token, or I was there to make a difference. And I was determined I was not going to be a token.”

One of the most attention-grabbing moves made under her leadership was a commitment to pay equity that started with an audit of employee salaries, seeking pay discrepancies between men and women, although only a few raises resulted.

“It was before pay equity was cool. … She just did it. She said, ‘Take a look at it.’ We got it done in two weeks, which was insane,” says Martin Chief Culture Officer Carmina Ortiz Drummond.

Cavallo also promoted Karen Costello from executive creative director to chief creative officer, replacing Alexander with Martin’s first woman in the role, in January 2018. Costello returned to ad agency Deutsch LA in 2020.

Decisive steps

Under Cavallo’s leadership, Martin publicly declared a new mission: We Fight Invisibility. The phrase applies internally to having a diverse workforce, as well as externally to creating advertising that stands out.

Martin has continued to hold to that ethos, even as other corporations have pulled back support for DEI initiatives over the past year or two. “It’s not difficult,” Cavallo says. “I think we’re on the right side of history, and I think it’s the right decision.” 

Chief in her fight against invisibility at Martin was building a visibly diverse leadership team. In a 58-year-old agency historically led mostly by white men, women now comprise more than half of the top leadership, and more than a third of the top leaders are Black, Indigenous or other people of color.

“It’s important to me, because I believe it is the right thing to do, and it’s also important to me because it is the business-correct thing to do,” she says. “Every study ever done on diversity of leadership has shown that a diverse leadership team delivers higher margin, higher morale, higher team participation and higher revenue.”

In March 2018, Cavallo promoted Drummond to the newly created role of chief culture officer, a blend of chief talent officer and chief operating officer. Her responsibilities include talent resources and recruiting, operational budgets and agency technology. Drummond approached Cavallo about becoming Martin’s COO, but Cavallo told her that wasn’t the role she wanted.

“She said, ‘Just do me a favor. Everything you talk about is about people,’” Drummond recalls. “And she says, ‘Go write your job description. Here’s the title I was thinking about, but put any title you want at the top.’ … And [I] came back and she went, ‘Done.’”

Multiple members of Cavallo’s leadership team recount their own twists on the same story, including Martin’s first Black chief creative officer, Danny Robinson, whom Cavallo promoted from group creative director to the new role of chief client officer in May 2019.

Initially, Robinson was hesitant about the new job because it sounded “like I was going to be a suit. I was going to be the opposite side of the creative,” he says, but “she was right. It was probably the best thing for me at that time. The things that I learned in those two years were invaluable for the position I’m in now. … She put me in a position that forced me to learn new things, forced me to get out of my comfort zone.”

Current Martin Chief Client Officer Michael Chapman worked under Cavallo when she was a Martin group planning director, and when she became CEO, she promoted him from chief strategy officer to chief growth officer. “She’s got an incredible mind to be able to catalog people’s current capability and opportunity — what they can grow into,” he says.

Building momentum

Cavallo was inspired by the 2018 documentary “This Changes Everything,” about gender disparity in the entertainment industry, and shared it with the firm’s executive committee. As a result, in October 2022, Martin announced its 50/50 Initiative, a commitment to hire at least half of its creative talent from underrepresented groups (in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, ability and sexual orientation) for video content production. During the first half of 2023, 75.5% of the agency’s video content production was handled by creative talent from underrepresented groups.

Cavallo’s changes have made a measurable difference. Before she took over in December 2017, 59.9% of Martin employees were women, but they comprised only 25% of the firm’s leadership committee. Six years later, 65.8% of Martin’s employees are female, with women comprising 57.1% of Martin’s executive committee. Before Cavallo, only 14% of Martin’s employees were BIPOC, and none were represented in the executive committee. As of Sept. 31, 27.9% of employees and 35.7% of committee members were BIPOC. 

Cavallo’s reasoning that diversity improves business seems to be holding true. According to Martin, the agency saw almost 30% growth in net new and organic revenue in 2022.

Martin also added an entertainment division in June, which works to get brands into entertainment media through original content or by forging partnerships with existing creators or products, like social media influencers or streaming TV shows.

Cavallo knew who she wanted to lead the division: Alanna Strauss, then senior vice president of creative and content at Fender Musical Instruments. Strauss had also headed creative and brand partnerships at Netflix, where she oversaw a partnership with Domino’s Pizza to promote the sci-fi show “Stranger Things” with a custom app to “order pizza with your mind.”

Cavallo and Strauss talked for 10 months before Strauss took the role, and Strauss says: “I got to know her more and more, and I always say to people, ‘Not working with her was not an option in my life.’ I absolutely knew I had to be in her orbit.”

The advertising industry and major clients have taken note of the new Martin under Cavallo’s leadership. Martin was named Adweek’s Agency of the Year in 2020 and 2021, as well as Ad Age’s Agency of the Year in 2023.

When Cavallo became CEO, she and CarMax Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer Jim Lyski met for drinks, he says, and he told her “something to the effect of, ‘We’re never going to do business with you guys until you fix your culture.”’

Lyski saw a new culture demonstrated in Cavallo’s choices for her leadership team and through meetings with them, he says, which led to CarMax selecting Martin in 2019 as its creative agency of record.

Reaching the summit

In 2020, Martin won major accounts like Axe, Century 21, Old Navy and Twisted Tea. In 2022, Anheuser-Busch named Martin the agency of record for its Bud Light seltzer brand and Bud Light Next, a zero-calorie beer. That same year, without having to give pitches, Martin became the agency of record for Royal Caribbean, Santander and LegalShield, according to Adweek.

Among other attractive qualities in a business partner, Cavallo is “superhuman in the way that she makes herself available,” says Royal Caribbean Chief Marketing Officer Kara Wallace. “She’s responsible for businesses all over the world, but as a client, you’d never know it, because she’d jump on the phone with you in a heartbeat if you needed it.”

Recently, Martin has produced work for Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas cruise ship, which is slated to make its maiden voyage on Jan. 27, 2024. Along with traditional advertising platforms like television, Martin listed the ship on Zillow in October 2022, allowing people to explore it virtually. In March, Martin recreated two sections of the ship, with accompanying games, within the world of the video game Fortnite.

In November, celebrity rapper Snoop Dogg announced he was “going smokeless,” revealing a few days later he was partnering with Texas-based smokeless fire pit maker Solo Stove, a campaign that Martin created.

Martin’s revenue grew 30% in 2020 and 15% in 2021, according to Adweek. In March 2022, Ad Age named it a “standout agency” on its Agency A-List, citing its 2021 growth and campaigns for Geico, Old Navy and Axe.

In November 2022, Cavallo added the title of MullenLowe Global CEO. In that role, she oversees 4,500 employees spread across 55 markets worldwide.

“She raised her hand and sort of said, ‘Look, my kids are out of the house now,’ so Kristen was what they call an empty nester and was ready to be away from Richmond more and do more work and travel outside her … sphere of influence,” Leikikh says.

At MullenLowe, Cavallo oversaw a rebranding, including a redesigned logo. During the time she had been at Martin, various MullenLowe offices developed different cultures. “I don’t think they were operating as a team well enough,” she says, so she made a strategic decision to restructure MullenLowe’s U.S. leadership. She created the roles of chief culture officer and MullenLowe West president, mirroring the company’s existing MullenLowe East president. Cavallo has also been searching for a MullenLowe U.S. CEO, and as of early October, had made an offer to an executive.

View from the top

As MullenLowe’s global CEO, Cavallo is constantly on the move, traveling every week, which seems to suit her. From Nov. 1 to Nov. 9, she was set to fly to Boston and back to Richmond, then to London, followed by New York, before returning home.

Her mind, too, covers miles in hours: “She’s really good [at brainstorming] organically and just on the fly,” says Leikikh. “That’s just how her brain works.”

Cavallo’s brother Pete Pflugrath puts it a little differently: “She really can talk faster than I can listen, and so I just tend to tune her out after a while. … Her brain is just on a different speed, which is awesome.”

Of herself, Cavallo reflects, “It’s funny — going throughout my career, I can look back at old performance reviews, and impatience is probably a thing I got dinged on for years, and I finally found a role where it’s an asset.”

Cavallo’s constantly plugged in. She’s forthright about her insomnia, and it’s not unusual for the Martin executive committee group chat to receive 3 a.m. texts from her.

Aside from her children, work is Cavallo’s major focus at this stage in her life. “I don’t think this is the season of my life for a lot of hobbies,” she says. Cavallo, who is divorced, has traveled to every continent with her son, Matt, and her 19-year-old daughter, Kate. She displays photos of Matt in Antarctica and Kate with a cheetah in South Africa on a side table in her office, which holds a table that can seat six and a sitting area but no desk. Tucked away in a corner behind a bookshelf, a cardboard cutout of Dwayne Johnson grins. Cavallo and Kate gave their family members “COVID buddies,” and The Rock was Cavallo’s.

Cavallo is quietly generous; her family members praise her good deeds. For instance, “she helps out with our kids in need” by donating to cover students’ lunch debts and to support a Saturday tutoring program, says her younger brother, Mike Pflugrath, principal of Osbourn High School in Manassas.

For the past 14 years, Cavallo also has been sponsoring four children through nonprofit New Hope Homes, which provided a home for 28 orphaned and abandoned children in Rwanda and now supports their education. In 2012, Cavallo and her children traveled to Rwanda to meet them, and in 2019, she and Kate returned to celebrate as two of the children graduated high school.

Cavallo’s hopes for her professional legacy align with the intentional, impactful generosity she shows in her personal life.

Summing up her goals, she says she aims to leverage her power and influence to help bust stereotypes. “My goal is to surpass ‘don’t fuck it up,’ and set the bar so high that the floodgates open for those who come next. I want to remind others of the importance of believing the future can be better than the past.”   

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VIRGINIA BUSINESS PERSON OF THE YEAR PAST HONOREES

2022
Jim McGlothlin, Chairman
The United Co., Bristol

2021
Bruce Thompson, CEO
Gold Key | PHR, Virginia Beach

2020
Phebe Novakovic, Chairman and CEO
General Dynamics, Reston

2019
Stephen Moret, President and CEO
Virginia Economic Development Partnership, Richmond

2018
John R. Lawson II, Executive chairman
W.M. Jordan Co., Newport News

2017
Nancy Agee, President and CEO
Carilion Clinic, Roanoke

2016
John F. Reinhart, CEO and executive director
Port of Virginia, Norfolk

2015
Knox Singleton, CEO
Inova Health System, Fairfax

2014
Christopher J. Nassetta, President and CEO
Hilton Worldwide, McLean

2013
Tonya Mallory, CEO
Health Diagnostic Laboratory, Richmond

2012
Philip A. Shucet, President
The Philip A. Shucet Co., Norfolk

2011
Michael J. Quillen
Chairman
Alpha Natural Resources, Bristol

2010
Gerald L. Gordon, President and CEO
Fairfax County Economic Development Authority, Tysons

2009
Shawn Boyer, Founder and CEO
SnagAJob.com, Richmond

2008
Nicholas Chabraja, Chairman and CEO
General Dynamics, Falls Church