Key to our networked agency’s success is a borderless approach to talent and working, which began in 2019 and has grown over the past four years. We believe our hybrid-first model enables everyone to do their best work, and more effectively achieve the balance necessary for a full, happy life professionally and personally.
So with empathy in focus, our global executive team has empowered leaders and managers in local studios to embrace flexibility and technology. We employ tech-based solutions to engender collaboration within offices and across the global networked agency–including Microsoft Teams, Miro and X–while simultaneously modernizing our physical spaces to encourage and foster the in-person collaboration we’ve all missed over the course of the pandemic.
Global CEO Laura Maness set a vision for the global networked agency when she assumed her post in August 2022: to be the world’s most entrepreneurial creative company (and community) that shapes culture and enriches people’s lives, and to have fun doing it.
This vision permeates everything about the employee experience and outlook at Grey–from the clients we take and the work that we do, to the internal events and speakers we bring in to inspire our people and the pro-bono campaigns and important research we fund.
Grey Group aspires to an environment in which we can all bring our best selves to work and do the best work of our careers. To do this, we build our approach on three tenets: belonging, career development and holistic wellness.
Belonging is achieved through focus on the creation and maintenance of community across our globally networked agency. It informs where we educate and invest, and ultimately helps leadership to understand changes necessary to achieve our desired level of diversity, inclusion, and allyship. Our commitment to L&D – at all levels – ensures everyone is given a voice at Grey, and a path to leadership. Finally, happy employees are productive employees, and our commitment to employee support ensures everyone is able to bring their authentic self and voice to work.
We are whole-heartedly committed to the personal and professional growth and career development of our people and we invest heavily in L&D programs across our networked agency. As a result, learning and development is at the core of the Grey Group experience globally.
Our goal with L&D is to create a broad offering – with programs around a variety of topics including mentorship for female talent and people of color, management training, mental health education, platform-specific technology training, and Unconscious Bias and Bias in Recruitment programs–to name a few.
Lastly, we offer wellness seminars and mental health support and counseling for employees and their families, in addition to flexible work opportunities and a borderless approach to support working parents which has resulted in an extremely balanced workforce.
Grey Group’s values are simple and frequently referenced: Creativity, Unity, Empathy and Service.
Since our collective’s inception in 1917, we’ve held the core belief that creativity is the most powerful force in the world, and we empower our people every day to use that force to make an impact. Creativity is paramount, but it’s not the only value that drives our culture: unity and the understanding of our place in the wider world; empathy and a generosity of spirit; service, taking greater responsibility for our collective impact, further guide how we act inside and outside of our agency walls, and reflect everything that matters to us and defines our agency mantra.
The Global Creative Council, 12 diverse creative leaders from Grey’s global agency meet regularly with one goal: build a strong creative culture that delivers Famously Effective, culturally relevant, awarded work for our clients. The outputs of those meetings are shared with the agency to educate and inspire.
Diversity, Inclusion, Equity & Representation Charter. The charter defines how the agency team cultivates diverse thinking, hires diverse production partners, and engages clients to commit to highlighting diverse representation in the creative.
#5Things: This Week in Social podcast series celebrates social media; designed for marketers, influencers, and digital enthusiasts, it’s where we discuss the world of social and how it impacts our brands. In 2022, Grey’s #5Things podcast won Adweek’s Annual Podcast of the Year Awards for Best Agency-Hosted Podcast.
Grey New York has granted the wishes of hundreds of children through a partnership with New Alternatives for Children Holiday Gift Drive (NAC). NAC serves the most vulnerable children in New York City: those who have a disability or chronic illness, who are living in poverty, and who are at risk of abuse and neglect.
In 2022, Laura Maness joined Grey as Global CEO, the first female since its founding. She solidified and galvanized a global leadership team focused on one vision—to deliver “Famously Effective” work—that resulted in record award wins, and industry honors.
Prior to joining Grey, Laura was CEO of Havas New York where her inspired leadership drove a culture of purposeful growth and steered a turnaround that earned the agency numerous “Best Of” honors. She sits on several boards including the world’s largest NGO for orphaned and abandoned children (SOS Children’s Villages), and B Lab, the governing body of the B Corp Movement.
The common thread is Laura’s belief that people genuinely have the power and the obligation to apply their minds and might to do good, in the workplace and in the world. She motivates others with the empathy, humility, and strength, and most importantly, leads by example.
Grey boasts a progressive parental leave policy across the world—which has recently expanded to include parental (not just maternal), foster, adoption, and caregiver leave. And while the amount of leave varies between office and region, our goal is always to outpace industry standards.
We’ve also created flexible work opportunities and a borderless approach to support working parents, which has resulted in an extremely balanced workforce—with more than 50% of Grey’s global staff identifying as female, and almost 40% of leadership identifying as such.
Grey Group has helped to launch, sustain, renew and reinvent great brands for many of the world’s great marketers for 105 years. Our goal is to be a world leader in applying creativity to solve our clients’ business challenges. To live, breathe and fulfill our “Famously Effective” credo: crafting big, powerful ideas that resonate in culture to drive brand and business success and build a better world. Grey offers a full complement of marketing services including traditional advertising, social media, brand activation and healthcare marketing.
Grey is part of AKQA Group. Its parent company is WPP (NYSE: WPP). The agency serves a blue-chip roster of many of the world’s best-known companies: Procter & Gamble, Google, Volvo, Amazon, GlaxoSmithKline, Kellogg’s, Netflix, the NBA, Pfizer, YouTube, MassMutual, Nestlé and Applebee’s. In recent years, Grey has been named ADWEEK’S “Global Agency of the Year” twice, ADVERTISING AGE’s “Agency of the Year” and CAMPAIGN magazine’s “Global Network of the Year” in recognition of its creative and business performance. Please go to grey.com for further information.
Grey Group Global HQ
200 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
Advertising/Marketing/Public Relations
Laura Maness
1001 - 10000
