Cultivating the “Allan Gregg brand”

— Allan Gregg

Allan Gregg insists the events that began his ascent to the top of the Canadian polling industry back in the 1970s and ’80s are attributable as much to serendipity — mere chance — as his ability to recognize opportunities and act upon them.

Today, he’s chairman of Toronto-based Strategic Counsel Inc., a research firm that does $8 million a year in business with a staff of 29. He’s better known as a television personality, a regular on CBC’s The National’s “At Issue” panel, and interviewing writers and other influential people on TV Ontario’s Studio 2 and Gregg and Company. He recently started writing a regular column for Maclean’s magazine on popular culture.

He has five jobs at last count, yet he never seems rushed. A single father, he breakfasts with his son, 13, and daughter, 15, every morning and drives them to school. (He also has a 26-year-old son.) He even managed to play 70 rounds of golf last year.

Gregg, 49, is a textbook lesson on the value of personal branding. His face is everywhere, his voice is familiar, he keeps a high profile despite a recent business debacle — his disastrous effort to start a record company, Song Corp., which went into receivership last spring. He attributes that failure partly to overconfidence, and you can hardly blame him; he seemed to have a Midas touch until then.

“Like many careers, [my success] was more a confluence of fortuitous circumstances than any big plan,” he says, seated on a couch in an informal meeting area in Strategic Counsel’s midtown Toronto offices.

An Edmonton-born graduate of the University of Alberta, he was working on his doctorate in Canadian politics with a specialization in popular culture and voting behaviour at Carleton University in 1975, when his wife’s pregnancy forced him to find work. He landed a part-time job on Parliament Hill as social policy co-ordinator for the opposition Tories. When a Tory leadership convention was called, Gregg joined colleague Ian Green in setting up an in-house polling operation for the party, which, until then, had been reluctantly using a U.S. pollster.

“We set up a virtual company — not for profit — inside the Conservative party,” he recalls. “We used grey-haired grannies in tennis sneakers, using Opposition research toll-free lines.” Gregg schlepped boxes of key-punch cards to Carleton’s computing department, where he analysed the results.

When Joe Clark became party leader, Green became Clark’s executive assistant, leaving Gregg in charge of the research program. The first thing Clark wanted was a briefing on public opinion.

“So here I am, 26 years old, hair down to here, two earrings, tattoos, don’t even know how to tie a tie and I’m briefing Joe Clark,” Gregg says.

He was appointed national campaign secretary — the No. 3 position in the Tory campaign — and his first assignment was to hire a political pollster. That’s when he made a discovery that would change his life: there were no social policy polling firms in Canada; only market research firms such as Goldfarb Consultants, which specialized in surveys for packaged goods, existed.

Gregg decided then and there that, regardless of the election result, he would fill the void in public affairs research in Canada by starting his own firm after the election.

He found two partners: Dick Wirthlin, an American pollster, to supply administration and technology; and Foster Advertising, the Tories’ ad agency, which put up the money. Gregg took care of marketing and “public face,” and Decima Research Ltd. took off.

In 1989, Gregg and his partner, David MacNaughton, sold Decima to Britain-based WPP Group PLC in a stock-and-cash deal worth $43 million. Although the stock component turned out to be overvalued, Gregg and MacNaughton, as majority shareholders, split 85% of $15 million. Gregg continued to work for the WPP-owned Decima until 1994, when he quit — partly because his wife, Marjorie, had become ill and, with three children, he wanted to spend more time with his family.

Marjorie died in 1995, and Gregg had to rethink his role as a father. When two former Decima colleagues approached him to start a new research firm, Gregg said it would have to be on his terms. “I had some unique personal needs. I was not prepared to make those secondary to my professional interests. I was basically able to create and carve out a job that served my family and my needs.” They formed Strategic Counsel and Gregg works there two days a week.

Also in 1995, contacts through volunteer work as chairman of the Toronto International Film Festival and through a lawyer acquaintance helped land him a part-time position as president of entertainment giant Viacom Enterprises Canada Ltd.. The job was essentially to improve the image of Viacom, which had just purchased Famous Players Inc. in Canada. And it took only half his time.

Since 1986, he had dabbled in the music business — his other passion. He is partner in the Management Trust Ltd., an artist management company that handles bands such as The Tragically Hip. It was a business he entered because of his fascination with music. And he valued the skills of his partner, artist manager Jake Gold.

His contract at Viacom ended in 1999, and Allan Gregg — pollster, television personality and entertainment mogul — seemingly could do no wrong. One dream he hadn’t realized was to head a Canadian record label.

Gregg had practically invented the public affairs research industry in Canada. It was time to show the Canadian music industry how it should be done. His plan: “To acquire a number of extant companies in the music business, create a critical mass, raise some dough to finance this acquisition, take the thing public, have it grow like topsy and Bob’s your uncle! I’ll be a big record company executive!”

He jumped in with both feet, raising $15 million on the Canadian Venture Exchange through Yorkton Securities Inc. The newly created Song Corp. acquired Attic Records, Canada’s biggest independent record label, for $5 million and music publisher TMP for $2.2 million. Gregg retained their management and hired Bill Ott, former head of distribution for Polygram Group, to handle the new firm’s distribution.

His company’s success would depend on inking deals to distribute records for Canada’s independent record labels. But, Gregg says, multinational record companies put up stiffer competition than he’d expected. One firm offered an independent company five times what Song Corp. was prepared to pay.

Larry LeBlanc, Canadian editor of Billboard magazine, the music industry trade journal, says there were many more problems. He says Song Corp. paid too much for Attic and TMP, and the company was competing with established independent distributors as well as the multinationals. The firm started with a staff of 81 in 1999 — fat for a record industry start-up — and was cutting staff by 30 positions by January 2001.

Unable to meet revenue targets, Song Corp. filed for bankruptcy in May 2001.

While Song Corp. was falling apart, Gregg watched actor Paul Gross perform in a band at the Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto. “They were terrible, just awful,” he recalls. “What a silly dink,” Gregg thought as he watched the actor embarrass himself onstage. “Here’s a guy who thinks because he’s good at one thing, he’s good at everything.”

It was an all-too familiar observation. “I know someone else who suffers from the same hubris,” Gregg thought. “Me.”

After the collapse of Song Corp., Gregg decided to “dust off the old Gregg brand.” He’s devoting more energy to the research business and he’s in the media more than ever. “Part of my strength is self-promotion. That’s what I’m really good at: getting myself in front of an audience, writing, speaking, using the media and using that to my advantage.” IE

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