As part of Kindred’s all female management team, Sinéad Gray is at the forefront of a new wave of creative leaders reimagining the creative workplace of the future.
Despite it being 2019, an all-female management team remains something of a unicorn in the creative industries. When Kindred unveiled its three-strong management team last year, industry headlines fixated on the all-female line up. Yet the success of the management trio Sinéad Gray, Sharon Bange and Tara Austin is more than just a catchy headline. We’ve seen a creative growth which is reflective of the fact that Kindred’s heritage in behaviour change extends beyond the roster of brands it works for, into positively impacting its own business and also working practices of the industry as a whole.
Gray and the team represent a very different kind of management model to what has been traditionally seen in the advertising industry. It is notable that Kindred has placed as much passion and vigour into building its own unique culture, as it has poured into clients such as The Department for Education’s Get into Teaching campaign and Lufthansa.
Kindred’s agency doesn’t just benefit from the presence of the numerous office dogs, but a commitment to flexible working which has seen the agency introduce core hours of 10am to 4pm. Gray’s fellow Managing Director Sharon Bange was rewarded with a coveted spot in the Timewise Power Part Time list, on the success of her four-day flexible working week, proving that flexibility and ambition are not mutually exclusive pursuits.
If you are going to create change, you can’t just do it with 50% [of the population]; you have got to talk to 100%.
Sinéad Gray
Gray extends this support for women in the advertising industry outside the confines of the four walls of Kindred’s offices. As a former president of the Bloom network, she founded the annual BloomFest, the conference which helped spur the creation of the TimeTo campaign to eradicate sexual harassment in the advertising industry. Speaking in support of Bloom’s recent partnership with the Book of Man, she explains: “If you are going to create change, you can’t just do it with 50% [of the population]; you have got to talk to 100%.”
It was a campaign encouraging teenage girls to drink milk however, ‘Make Mine Milk’ that really made Gray fall in love with the industry. Gray says it was the first real moment “I’d experienced integration in a way that worked really well.” She also saw the power of social through ‘the Milk Challenge’ led by an unknown teenage pop star by the name of Justin Bieber who just happened to be in town.
A big part of being able to think clearly and being able to be inspired is doing something that just lets your brain not think for a little bit.
Sinéad Gray
Gray has been at Kindred twice, leaving briefly in between stints to work at Ogilvy before returning to be part of the management team. She feels that Kindred’s “positive change positioning is hugely motivating” and aligns with the “rising tide of consumer awareness.”
As an independent agency, Gray says Kindred benefits from having the freedom to work only with “brands we admire and problems we want to solve.” One of those was the 2018 campaign highlighting the plight of modern slavery. “The estimates are that there’s 13,000 people in this country affected.” Gray reveals that besides the coverage and awareness the campaign received, it also led to two people being identified as being modern slaves, who are currently being supported by specialist authorities.
Being at the top of her game demands that Gray finds the time to make space for her own creative pursuits. As a keen reader, she is following in the footsteps of legendary children’s author Roald Dahl by heading out to the Norwegian fjords this summer on a kayaking expedition. Having boxed for the last few years, Gray believes that it is only by switching off that she can actually think clearly. As she explains: “The way that we work at the moment, you’re completely bombarded all the time with information overload and I think a big part of being able to think clearly and being able to be inspired is doing something that just lets your brain not think for a little bit.”
As an independent agency, we work to the philosophy of choosing only to work with brands and organisations we admire, and on problems we want to solve.
Sinéad Gray
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