200. Cindy Gallop

0:01Cindy Gallop:This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:11Cindy Gallop:Well behaved women rarely make history. Bloody difficult women do. Well, folks, I think you should expect the unexpected in my conversation with Cindy Gallop. she's an advertising executive and she's a female entrepreneur who's currently focusing on her website which is called make love not porn she's also a proud cougar welcome to difficult women

1:02Cindy Gallop:Cindy Gallop is a woman with many hats, although you're not wearing one today. We speak to you in your midtown loft on Fifth Avenue. I'm very, very envious. Cindy straddles the worlds of advertising, media and tech entrepreneurship. and you call yourself the Michael Bay of business and you like to blow shit up and I think we'll come to that because I'm not quite clear in my own mind who Michael Bay is. You founded some extraordinary enterprises from We Ran the World which is your current one of your current iterations but I came across you when you were the CEO of an action marketing platform called Make Love Not porn which we will be talking about um let's start though Cindy with why you like the the title of

1:54Rachel Johnson:this podcast difficult women oh my god yep no as I just said to you Rachel I adore the title of your podcast because honestly you know difficult women is simply the term given to any of us when we are being our authentic selves saying what we really think you know pursuing what we believe in and so I'm all about women being difficult as often as is humanly possible.

2:20Cindy Gallop:Very good and I'm just while we speak looking up Jane the late great Jane Goodall's quote about difficult women which I'm going to quote back to you and towards the end I'm going to ask you of course about your difficult times. She actually said it doesn't take much to be considered a difficult woman that's why there are so many of us so I think you and Jane Goodall are on the same page here which is as soon as you step out of line or out of your lane you're considered difficult kind of wacky um like I remember when we did the Oxford Union together so many years ago it it was considered quite outre of the Oxford Union to have had you so for those of our listeners who aren't aware of the Cindy Gallop phenomenon can you tell us the you know the shape of your career to date

3:17Rachel Johnson:sure so my background is 40 years working in brand building marketing and advertising which I always say is very useful experience what I do now with my business make love not porn because I've spent 40 years working in the business of getting people to do things that they originally had no intention of doing, which is a very useful skill. And, you know, advertising has been, you know, a great industry to work in for many reasons, but I've especially championed women in advertising and also women in business and in tech, because there are not nearly enough of us leading these industries in the way that we should.

3:59Rachel Johnson:And so I'm very vocal about that and I'm especially vocal building my business Make Love Not Porn which has been particularly challenging because you know women speaking about sex openly honestly and frankly is regarded as especially oh my god what's going on so um so that's been um a very entertaining path

4:25Cindy Gallop:that's that's let's start with advertising and then get to women speaking about sex in terms of your campaigns i mean faye weldon was famous for having apparently copywritten go to work on an egg uh or was that salmon rushdie i can't remember no i think he did um the aero campaign all the bubbles and everything so there are some really memorable uk advertising campaigns in terms of women's participation that you've helped bring to public attention are there any campaigns that um difficult women listeners will be aware of or recognize

5:03Rachel Johnson:oh well to be frank um i mean there there are many amazing women um working in advertising but um i'll be honest the most famous campaigns were inevitably um created by men because very Why inevitably? Yeah, because very ironically, for an industry whose primary target is women, you know, we are the purchasers and influencers, the purchasers of everything. Advertising is still massively male dominated. And honestly, the reason for that, Rachel, is the reason why I explain to people that my so-called successful advertising career was entirely down to luck. I was very lucky on two fronts. The first is that I was lucky because I was never sexually harassed in a way that ended my career.

6:00Rachel Johnson:And by the way, I was absolutely sexually harassed, but not as happened to so many women where I resisted, retaliated and was forced out of the agency and out of the industry. The advertising industry has hemorrhaged vast amounts of female talent, creativity and skills because of sexual harassment. And then the other respect in which I was, I can count the number of female bosses I had in my entire advertising career on the fingers of one hand, too. I virtually always worked for men, but I was lucky enough to work for men at every agency I worked at who saw my potential before I did, actively wanted me to succeed, championed me and gave me every opportunity to do so.

6:45Rachel Johnson:And I have to tell you, that is not the experience to this day of most women in the advertising industry.

6:52Cindy Gallop:Do you want to give them name checks now? You know, in the same way that people are invited to name a teacher that inspired them. Why don't you name the two women bosses who saw your potential and encouraged you?

7:07Rachel Johnson:Well, actually, they were great. But it was, ironically, because I work for men most of the time. You know, I work for men who championed me. But the two bosses were a wonderful woman at my very first advertising agency job, Ted Bates, which no longer exists. Her name was Francesca Lancet. And by the way, I remember her very fondly because I moved from a career in theatre marketing. And I was paid an even more repentance in theatre. So I haunted vintage stores and charity shops. And I remember Francesca taking me into a conference room, shutting the door, sitting me down and in the nicest possible way, explaining to me that if I wanted to be taken seriously by my Mars clients and their offices at Slough, it'd be a good idea to drop the see-through black chiffon blouse and leather-skinned miniskirt.

8:02Rachel Johnson:she um she did it in the best possible way you know and i went oh my god now i have to go and buy a suit um but i managed to find a very stylish suit at whistles i remember it fondly to the stales my first suit it was um and again this is london in the 80s it was a black houndstooth check padded shoulders nipped in waist ski pants you recall the thing the kind of thing and um and And so I was able to wear a suit, but bring my own sense of style to it. But that was Francesca. And the other female boss I had was at my next agency, Jay Walter Thompson. And her name was Kate Wilson. And again, she was wonderful to work for.

8:44Rachel Johnson:But those were literally the only two female bosses my entire career.

8:49Cindy Gallop:Extraordinary. And of course, I've seen Mad Men with Jon Hamm, which is an unironic series about the sexism, the excesses of the advertising industry in the 50s and 60s, where men are men and secretaries come to be sort of shagged on the desk and then dismissed. and there's a sort of complete carousel of gorgeous, busty, young women who are never on the creative side. How much has advertising changed? It must have changed, Cindy, since then.

9:27Rachel Johnson:Do you know, depressingly, Rachel, when I watched Mad Men, I thought, A, there are ways in which our industry has changed, but honestly, what was depressing was how much it has not. And I have to tell you that even today in 2025, it's still male dominated. And in fact, to be perfectly frank, it's going backwards. What? I'm based here in America and the political climate around us means that people are more emboldened to feel free about rejecting diversity, equity and inclusion. And so what I encourage women to do these days is start your own agency. And when I say that, I don't mean start an agency like the ones you see around you.

10:17Rachel Johnson:Start something that gives you agency, because there is so much opportunity to reinvent the future of advertising through the female lens.

10:42Cindy Gallop:But as you say, most product is bought by women. And yet the adverts are made by men. So presumably there must be an enormous gap in the market for making adverts that are better targeted towards the woman consumer. Has nobody seen this gap in the market apart from you?

11:07Rachel Johnson:Do you know, many of us women have been banging on about this for years because studies regularly show that 90 % of women believe that advertising is not relevant to them. And that's because we are being targeted through the male lens. And the enormous irony, Rachel, is that, you know, not only are we the primary purchaser of everything, there's another very important reason to absolutely speak to us in a way that lands with relevance. Because women don't just buy, women share, you know, because basically social media is simply a whole new methodology for us to do what we've been doing since the dawn of time, which is sharing the shit out of everything in a way that men do not.

11:52Rachel Johnson:Because we're the gossipers, we're the chatterers, the advocates, the ambassadors. So much so, I say to brands that think they're targeting men, talk to women. Because women will influence men more than men will influence other men.

12:06Cindy Gallop:And of course, famously, because I've published books and the marketing tool, the best marketing tool is word of mouth. Exactly, exactly. And so if you can get women talking about something, then you're halfway there to them opening their pocketbooks and buying it, presumably.

12:23Rachel Johnson:Precisely. Exactly.

12:25Cindy Gallop:Can you think of an advert before we move on to your extraordinary career with trying to detoxify porn? can you think of an advert you probably can't off the top of your head that you think succeeds in hitting the female audience in the right place yeah do you know Rachel I absolutely

12:48Rachel Johnson:can because this is a very old campaign this campaign ran something like 25 years ago but I regularly use it as a case study because it made me completely change my behavior and you you may may not remember this, but this campaign was born out of an actual business problem, which was that all those years ago, De Beers, you know, the diamond company, were mining a ton of very small diamonds. And the center of gravity of De Beers business is, as you know, the whacking great engagement rock, you know. And so they had to find something to do with this glut of small diamonds. And J. Walter Thompson, their agency, recommended that they incorporate small diamonds into very contemporary modern designs and that they market these diamond rings as the opposite of the engagement ring.

13:40Rachel Johnson:They market them to single women to buy for themselves because smaller diamonds meant cheaper price points and they called it the right hand ring and they had a campaign which ran on print and outdoor where and it was brilliant copywriting to this day I remember it said things like, you know, your right hand rocks the cradle, your left hand rules the world. Sorry, your left hand rocks the cradle, your right hand rules the world. Women of the world, raise your right hand. And it was promoting the right hand ring as a symbol of independence and power and confidence of single women. I've never been a jury person.

14:20Rachel Johnson:I've never felt the slightest desire for diamonds. I took one look at that campaign. I went, I want one. and actually the great was i just moved to new york to start up the american office of bbh the agency i work for and i was i was talking to everyone about this campaign jwt rang me up and went you are being a brilliant pr agent would you like the wholesale price and i went oh my god yes and i bought three right hand rings have you still got it have you still got it you know i still have

14:50Cindy Gallop:that's brilliant well that's your advertising career let's move on to the other hat which is make love not porn a user generated i.e you can upload content i can upload content within the agreed parameters and according to your conditions to a video sharing site where in where we call where what we call real people a real world um sex does upload videos of their real life sexual experiences why is this different from only fans have you been superseded sure um no not at all

15:21Rachel Johnson:So I started Make Love Not Porn nearly 17 years ago now because I date younger men. And through my own personal experience, I realized long before everyone else did that when we don't talk openly and honestly about sex, porn becomes sex education by default in not a good way. Quite. I want to talk about this. And so 16 years ago, I put up a tiny clunky website at makelovenotporn.com that in its original version was kind of a public service announcement. Porn world versus real world. Here's what happens in the porn world. Here's what really happens in the real world. I launched at the TED conference in 2009.

16:00Rachel Johnson:I became the only TED speaker to utter the words, come on my face on the TED stage several times. Talk went viral. The entire world responded. I've uncovered a huge global social issue. And I turned Make Love Not Porn into what we are today, which is if porn is the Hollywood blockbuster movie, Make Love Not Porn is the badly needed documentary. so we're a unique window onto the funny messy loving wonderful sex we all have in the real world and the differences on openly fans people are performing on make love not porn we answer the question everyone's asked since the dawn of time which is what is everybody else really doing

16:39Cindy Gallop:in bed we show you can i just i have to admit i haven't been on make love dot porn i mean we met in person and you talked about this in the Oxford Union in terms of your contributors the sex does privacy can anybody go on to make love not porn and click on a video and and see real people I mean do they hide their identities are they hiding their faces sure so so first of all

17:07Rachel Johnson:you can only view these videos if you pay for them so I created a revenue share model years before OnlyFans, our members subscribe and then rent and stream real world sex videos and half that revenue goes to our contributors who we call our MakeLoveNotPorn stars. But they are completely free to be anonymous. They have creative ways of you can wear masks, faces in shadow, out of frame and also something we do Can they just pixelate their faces? Sorry. If they want to. A lot of people are very happy showing their faces. Okay. So it's a safe space is what you're saying. Exactly. We watch every video from beginning to end before we approve or reject and we publish it.

17:51Rachel Johnson:So we vet everything by human eyes. And the moment you want your video taken down, we'll take it down immediately.

17:57Cindy Gallop:And it's down everywhere. So people may have downloaded it or are these videos non-downloadable? No, they're non-downloadable.

18:05Rachel Johnson:It's a safe space.

18:22Cindy Gallop:now um i'm impressed to hear that you date younger men i think you're in your mid-60s um and do you this has been something that's been relatively new or relatively um become normalized in society you know nicole kid mon baby girl uh you know brigitte macron and macron i mean it's now not regarded as completely whack if you have an older woman and a man 20 years younger um in your in new york where you live is has it become normalized or are you still considered an outlier do you still consider yourself an outlier well first of all i am an outlier um

19:05Rachel Johnson:I'm considering that, Rachel, because, and this is for our listeners, I am somebody who has never, ever wanted to be married. I've never wanted children. Very glad I always knew that as opposed to finding out the hard way by having them. I adore being single. I cannot wait to die alone. And I date younger men casually and recreationally for sex. And I'm deliberately very public about all of that because we don't have enough role models in our society for women and for men, by the way, that demonstrate you can live your life very differently to the way you're expected to and still be amazingly happy.

19:39Rachel Johnson:And I'm one of the happiest people I know. And so I'm an outlier on all of those fronts. But I have to tell you that even today in 2025, older man, younger woman, no one bats an eyelid. Older woman, younger man still somehow deemed less socially acceptable, which is also why I'm loud and proud about the fact that I like patients.

19:59Cindy Gallop:Good for you, Cindy. you're an icon for this podcast series um and i know many women listening will be feel immensely perked up by by listening to you and to the fact that you can pull younger men i mean are you on what are cougar dating sites i don't even i mean you must you must enlighten us and educate us

20:23Rachel Johnson:so here's the interesting thing rachel because um as you as you've said i meet the younger men I date on cougar dating sites and by the way there are a ton of them listeners um just google cougar