Julie Roehm Rehab Profile Says More About Business Press Than Advertising
Julie Roehm exposed herself to yet another profile piece — this time in Fast Company — in an attempt to rehab her image as a marketing consultant. The story illustrates the weird fascination that female business writers and their male editors have with Roehm (Forbes’ Allison Fass did a similar piece a year ago*).
As everyone knows, the former Walmart advertising chief was fired by the retailer for engaging in conflicts of interest during an agency review and for allegedly having an affair and/or behaving inappropriately with agency execs. This happened in 2006 but for some reason it’s still news to Fast Company.
Don’t get me wrong. I read the story right through to the end. There’s something eminently readable about the Roehm train wreck. She’s had to sell her house in Michigan to continue living in much cheaper Bentonville, Ark., even though she obviously hates it, since she left Walmart.
But its publication says more about the business media than it does about the world of advertising. Specifically, that female reporters often harbor the belief that Roehm got the short end of the stick (would a male ad chief who exchanged steamy emails with an underling have been pilloried so thoroughly?); and that male editors like to have a good looking blonde who admits to a sex life in the mag.
As usual in the Roehm profile ritual, we get something old and something new. The old bit is a rehash of how Roehm, while at Chrysler, commissioned “the Lingerie Bowl, a pay-per-view Super Bowl halftime show featuring supermodels playing football in their panties,” and other Chrysler ads involving urinals and wife swapping. Roehm was criticized for those:
It was like I was promoting sex slavery or something.
Ech. No, Julie, the point was not sex slavery, but sex wagery — and the latter doesn’t make those ads right.
Here’s the new bit. The writer, Danielle Sacks, is watching Sex and the City in Roehm’s living room with Roehm and her husband, Mike:
The final scene on the TV turns to Carrie Bradshaw lying in bed with her new boyfriend, Berger. She wants to know why he’s all hung on up his ex, and finally, he confesses it’s because she cheated on him. Julie is quiet. So is Mike. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see him briskly petting the schnauzer.
She cheated on him three years ago and despite the fact that he forgave her and previously gave up his career to look after her kids while she became a millionaire, she’s still inviting the press over to rake through it again. Classy!
Sacks stumbles upon a much more interesting story while in Bentonville, and proceeds to ignore it:
The social behavior of the town, the local woman [a Roehm neighbor] continues, is dictated by the retailer’s employee guidelines, which prevent anyone from accepting so much as a breath mint from a supplier. (And employees know they’re being watched: Wal-Mart reportedly has a stable of former FBI and CIA agents monitoring them.) Take her friend who works for PepsiCo: If she’s invited to a dinner party at a friend’s house and brings a case of Pepsi, “it’s a disaster trying to figure out who can drink a Pepsi or not.” Or those who want to shop at the new Target that just opened one town over. “If her husband works for Wal-Mart, his wife can’t be seen there, so she’ll give her shopping list to someone else.” After dishing for some 45 minutes, the woman suddenly hits self-preservation mode herself, pleading with me to keep her anonymous. “I am begging you, please. Oh my goodness,” she says, even though neither she nor her husband works for Wal-Mart or a supplier. “If all of this got out, we could be blackballed in two seconds. That’s the type of environment this is. Wal-Mart owns this town.”
It would be nice if Fast Company could go back to Bentonville and publish something on Walmart’s Stepford-ization of the town … but that would require female business writers and their male editors to get over their Roehm fetishes. Don’t hold your breath.
*Disclosure: Fass is a friend of mine.
Jim Edwards, a former managing editor of Adweek, has covered drug marketing at Brandweek for four years, and is a former Knight-Bagehot fellow at Columbia University's business and journalism schools. Follow him on Twitter or send him an email.
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