About 15 years ago, Jean Pool brought her eight-year-old daughter Elise to the office with her at J. Walter Thompson.
   As Pool toiled away sealing media deals, Elise worked busily with some Crayolas and a piece of paper. When she finished, Elise showed the picture to her mother.
   It showed a woman seated at a desk, her mouth wide open and a phone attached to her ear.
   In a cartoon bubble, the caption read: “JWT is a madhouse!”
   “I thought, my God, you’re insightful,” says Pool, now director of operations at Mindshare.
   “When people asked her, ‘Are you going to follow in your mother’s footsteps?’ she’d say, ‘No, this place is nuts.’”
    Jean Pool has spent most of her 31-year career at JWT and Mindshare (same madhouse, different name). But she didn’t exactly grow up dreaming about media.
    “I didn’t plan to go into advertising. I just fell into media and found that I was good at it. I’m lucky I didn’t fall into a dynamite factory.”
    Pool’s family immigrated to the U.S. from Scotland when she was just five years old. They ended up in Dearborn, Michigan, birthplace of Ford Motors and a perfect picture of an American company town.
    “We were the only immigrants within a billion miles. I was the only kid on the block with an accent, which disabled me from learning the language. I was so humiliated from the other kids teasing me that I dropped it within six months. I’ve had no ear for language ever since,” she says.
    Now she can’t even fake a Scottish accent.
    Growing up around Detroit, Pool sort of assumed that she would end up in the auto industry like her father and most others in town. And in those days, that meant being a secretary.
    “It is, after all, automotive. And I am, after all, a woman. But, to be quite honest, I couldn’t pass the damn typing test.”
     But for a stroke of morbid luck, that impediment might have kept her out of media, too.
    “At J. Walter Thompson they wanted me to take the typing test. But then someone had a heart attack all of the sudden, and that sort of drew attention away from me. So I got in without taking the test.”
     Early in her career Pool defected from JWT a few times. There was a stint at Grey Advertising. Another stint--a brush really--with Ross Roy lasted just five days.
    “In those days I had really long hair. My first day, a woman in personnel asked me, ‘What are you going to do with your hair?’ I thought, ‘Uh-oh, I don’t belong here.’
    “I did grow up in the Midwest, in a pretty conservative part of the country where women were nowhere near 50 percent of the workforce. It still amazes me that there aren’t more women at the top. I would say if women make up 25 percent of the upper execs in media, I’d be surprised.
    “I suspect that women aren’t as good at networking among themselves. The men are really good about that and, in a way, I think that women are at fault for not being more supportive of one another.”
     Around that time Pool and her husband started working with Colombian-American Friends, a group that finds homes for Colombian orphans. But she didn’t quite anticipate where it would lead--namely, to a 17-month-old girl named Elise.
     “When I adopted my daughter, I realized that I could be a much better mother if I was working. I love my daughter dearly, but some mothers just can’t stay at home, because you have to do what you’re good at. That’s when I realized I really loved advertising and needed it.”
     Her new daughter and swiftly advancing career made the late '70s a hectic time in Pool’s life. In 1980 she transferred to Toronto, which after Detroit seemed the height of sophistication.
     “It was sort of like, after you see Paris, you don’t want to go back to the farm,” she remarks.
     Luckily, Pool’s faithful husband Ted made all the moves with her; from Detroit to Toronto to New York.
    “He’s in forensic science, meaning he traces evidence for murders, rapes, pillaging, that sort of thing. And there’s never a paucity of dead bodies, so wherever we go, he’s got no problem.”
    Ted is also responsible for half a lifetime’s worth of jokes about Pool’s name.
    “I love my name,” Pool declares. “It wasn’t easy to find a Pool to marry to go along with Jean. I had to look hard.”
     It couldn’t have been too difficult to follow Pool across the country, as her career rocketed from her humble beginnings as a buyer for JWT Detroit, to overseeing 1,100 employees at Mindshare, the world’s biggest media buying firm.
     Pool doesn’t talk much about the difficulties of putting together a stellar career as a woman in a male-dominated business, all while moving up and raising a family. She’d much rather talk about her success in terms of things like “putting clients first” and being “in search of excellence”-- things that might sound worn-out coming from most people’s mouths. But when Pool says them, one can’t help but believe her.
    Perhaps that’s because she has so much fun doing what she does.
    “Fun is a primary ingredient in any business. Well, maybe not for a brain surgeon. But if you’re not having fun, you’re not going to do a good job, and you’re not going to have the passion or creativity necessary for this business. The people who have that are the ones who succeed--without question, without doubt, no exceptions.”

-Gabriel  Spritzer is a staff writer for Media Life.

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