Mary Baglivo
CEO, Saatchi & Saatchi New York

Rutgers Magazine
by John T. Ward

It’s not uncommon to find Mary Baglivo on her cell phone for most of her daily commute into Manhattan from her home in Short Hills. In mid-February, she’s discussing her timed-to-the-minute schedule for the day, which includes a meeting with a JCPenney executive from Texas to review the details of a launch party that night at the Hammerstein Ballroom. After meeting with the executive for several hours, Baglivo will bid him adieu and handle other tasks before heading uptown to the ballroom, where the company’s first new major ad campaign in years will be unveiled to the media. The event will include a performance by the singer Jewel and the screening of the television ads that will debut a few weeks later during the Academy Awards.

As worldwide marketing director and CEO of the New York arm of Saatchi & Saatchi—one of the world’s advertising giants—Baglivo RC’79 played a major role in convincing Penney executives that her agency was best equipped to help them launch “Every Day Matters,” an integrated marketing campaign aimed at overhauling the company’s print, broadcast, and online advertising, and the graphics and signage in its stores. Settling in for an interview hours before the launch party, there’s no hint of worry or anxiety in Baglivo’s low-timbre voice, which drops down to a throaty purr when she uses the word “awesome.” That happens often. So does laughter.

Baglivo seems to embody the serenity of her 18th-floor Soho office, a place of crisp white sofas, mood-softening candles, and a panoramic view west across the Hudson toward home. She has a reputation for equanimity, mixing the supreme confidence of an executive near the pinnacle of her field with a kind of hippie-chick “yeah, man” vibe. In fact, it would be just as accurate to say that, in Short Hills, she’s known as the suburban mother who “never, ever” misses her two kids’ many school activities, or the weekend bike rides with her friends—and just happens to be, on the side, one of the most powerful women in advertising. Because in neither realm do people who know her think of Baglivo as a CEO first, and mother second. To them, she’s both.

Baglivo, her oldest friends say, has always straddled multiple realms and excelled in them. At Union Township High School in the suburbs of Newark, before she was described by Canada’s National Post as “one of the industry’s highest ranking women” and long before she was recently honored as “Advertising Woman of the Year” by Advertising Women of New York, Baglivo was a hippie—sartorially, at least—with center-parted hair, bellbottoms abloom with floral images, and a patchouli cloud announcing her presence. “I was into Grateful Dead concerts,” she says, going momentarily cross-eyed for effect. Yet she was also a cheerleader, a member of the student government, a regular in advanced placement courses, and indisputably cool. “She was doing it all even then,” says Karen Betzer, RC '79, who met Baglivo when they were 14, roomed with her all through Rutgers, and brings her family from San Francisco to vacation with Baglivo’s family at the Jersey shore every summer. “It all worked. Mary was always who she is today.”

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