Mark Penn

Mark J. Penn (born January 15, 1954) is an American businessman, pollster, political strategist, and author.

Penn is chairman and chief executive officer of Stagwell, a marketing group. He was formerly chief strategy officer of Microsoft Corporation and chief executive officer of Burson-Marsteller. Penn is the author of the books Microtrends (2007) and Microtrends Squared (2018).

Together with Douglas Schoen, he was co-founder of the polling firm PSB Research, whose clients included President Bill Clinton, British prime minister Tony Blair, and Bill Gates. Penn was a chief strategist and pollster in the Hillary Clinton 2008 presidential campaign. Penn later became a defender of Donald Trump, opposing his impeachment, reportedly consulting on his 2020 presidential campaign (which Penn denies ), and alleging a "deep state" conspiracy against him.

Early life and education Penn was born in New York City and raised in Riverdale. His father, a Lithuanian immigrant, was a kosher poultry-plant owner, who died when Penn was 10 years old. He was raised by his mother Blanche, who worked as a schoolteacher. Both of his brothers credit Penn with keeping the family together after their father's death. Penn graduated from Horace Mann School in Riverdale in 1972. as well as polling classmates about sex and drugs.

Penn entered Harvard University in 1972. According to his brother, Penn was initially rejected, but he was able to get Harvard's dean to reverse the decision after taking the train to Boston and arguing his case. His work for the paper included reporting and analysis on buying a stereo, the Cambridge City Council elections of 1975, the Harvard admission process, and the controversy over the proposed construction in Cambridge of the John F. Kennedy Library. With Doug Schoen, who he attended Horace Mann School with, Penn co-founded Penn & Schoen – now the global market research firm Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates – in their dorm room. He graduated from Harvard in 1976.

Early political campaigns

Ed Koch mayoral campaign of 1977 and 1985 While Penn was a first-year law student at Columbia University in 1976, he and his business partner Douglas Schoen became the pollsters for congressman Ed Koch's second run for mayor of New York City. In 1977, with the campaign against Mario Cuomo for the Democratic nomination in full swing, Penn sought a way to conduct polls more quickly than the mainframe and punched card system he and Schoen were making use of at Columbia University. He purchased a self-assembled "microcomputer" kit and created a program that could compile polls in a fraction of the time than had been done before.

Penn also played a significant role in Koch's campaign during the 1985 New York City mayoral election, for which he and Schoen developed direct mailings, set up phone banks, organized volunteers and canvassers, and coordinated fundraising. That year, Koch won both the Democratic primary and the general election, defeating New York City Council President Carol Bellamy.

Luis Herrera Campins presidential campaign of 1978 and Latin American politics In 1978, Penn conducted polling for the presidential campaign of Luis Herrera Campins in Venezuela. Because Venezuela did not at that time have universal phone coverage, Penn partnered with Venezuelan polling firms to go door-to-door to collect interviews. He also helped the campaign develop the slogan "Ya Basta," or "Enough," critical of the incumbent party's spending policies. Herrera carried the election by about 3%.

The election marked the beginning of Penn's successful involvement in Latin American politics. Since 1979, Penn's firm has helped elect more than a half dozen heads of state in Latin America, including Venezuela's Carlos Andrés Pérez, Belisario Betancur and Virgilio Barco Vargas of Colombia, and Leonel Fernández of the Dominican Republic. When Begin called Penn in January 1981, public polling for the June parliamentary election showed that Begin's party, Likud, would lose the elections by a margin of 58 seats for the rival Labor Party to 20 seats for Begin's Likud party. A New York Times article published in March of that year stated that Begin was "probably in his final months as Prime Minister." Penn & Schoen applied the rapid polling techniques they had developed on Ed Koch's first campaign for mayor to provide Begin with a daily understanding of attitudes of the Israeli electorate.

Corporate work In the late 1980s, Penn was the force behind his firm's drive to win corporate consulting clients. Texaco, which was experiencing image problems due to bankruptcy after the Pennzoil v. Texaco court case, was the firm's first major corporate client. In 2006, a survey of global opinion leaders found that Microsoft was the world's most trusted company, an accomplishment which The Wall Street Journal partially attributed to Penn's advice.

His other corporate clients have included Ford Motor Company, Merck & Co., Verizon, BP, and McDonald's.

Microsoft Corporation In July 2012, Penn was named Corporate Vice President for Strategic and Special Projects at Microsoft Corporation. Shortly after he came on board, he began a public relations campaign against Google on behalf of Bing. Just in time for the holiday shopping season, he created a commercial in which Microsoft criticized Google for biasing its shopping search results with paid advertisements. "Don't get Scroogled", the commercial warned. In August 2013, Penn was named Executive Vice President for Advertising and Strategy. In that role, he pioneered Microsoft's "Honestly" campaign and the award-winning Super Bowl 2014 ad "Empowering Us All". In March 2014, he was named executive vice president and chief strategy officer by chief executive officer Satya Nadella. On June 17, 2015, it was announced he would be leaving Microsoft.

The Stagwell Group After leaving Microsoft, Penn founded The Stagwell Group, a private equity firm that invests in marketing services agencies with a $250 million investment from former Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer.

In May 2016, Penn told The Wall Street Journal that he wanted to create a "more digitally-focused advertising holding group, made up of companies which do not overlap in function," and offer a "fully-integrated solution across the continuum of marketing services." In 2023, Penn stated that his "political background brings a much-needed perspective to marketing." He described his philosophy as that in today's real-time, data-focused world, brands must have a constant finger on the pulse of the American consumer. In January 2017, the Stagwell Group acquired the Harris Poll from Nielsen Holdings and renamed it Harris Insights & Analytics. The firm has also acquired National Research Group, digital creative firm Code and Theory, media agency ForwardPMX, and marketing communications companies SKDK and Targeted Victory, among others.

Stagwell Inc. In August 2021, Penn merged the Stagwell Group with MDC Partners to form Stagwell Inc. Stagwell (Nasdaq: STGW) has offices in 35 countries and over 13,000 employees with its headquarters in New York City. Stagwell companies include GALE, Code and Theory, Harris Poll, Anomaly, Doner, Assembly, 72 and Sunny, etc. In February 2022, Penn announced the formation of the Stagwell Marketing Cloud. Penn, alongside Victor Ganzi, Josh Harris, James Tisch, and Thomas Peterffy, contributed to a $50 million investment fund in The Messenger, a news website that launched in May 2023. Stagwell entered the Fortune 1000 during Penn's tenure. As of summer 2023, Stagwell stock had more than tripled since Penn took the CEO role.

Penn served as pollster to Clinton for six years. During that time, he became one of Clinton's most prominent and influential advisers. In 2000, the Washington Post concluded in a news analysis that no pollster had ever become "so thoroughly integrated into the policymaking operation" of a presidential administration as had Penn.

U.S. federal government shutdown of 1995

Beginning in August 1995, at Clinton's request, Penn conducted numerous polls to understand what the political ramifications would be if the federal government were to shut down over disagreement between the legislative and executive branches over the budget.

Second term After the election, and for most of Clinton's second term, Penn and Schoen were hired to conduct 2–4 White House polls per month and met weekly with the President and the White House staff in the residence to review polls and policy ideas. These polls influenced Clinton's thinking and helped to refine his "new Democrat" language and policies that are one of his distinctive political contributions. Penn subsequently led the research effort monitoring Clinton's level of public support throughout the impeachment proceedings against him and until Clinton was acquitted on February 13, 1999.

Hillary Clinton

2000 and 2006 Senate campaigns In 2000, then-First Lady Hillary Clinton asked Penn to advise her on her run for the U.S. Senate from New York. During the campaign, tension brewed between Penn, who urged Clinton to focus on the issues, and other advisers, who urged Clinton to focus more on personality. Clinton followed Penn's advice and won the election. Penn served again as Clinton's pollster in her successful 2006 Senate reelection campaign.

2008 presidential campaign Until April 6, 2008, he served as chief strategist to Hillary Clinton's campaign for president. Penn and his colleagues held differences of opinion over how much to "humanize" Clinton, with Penn arguing that the vast majority of voters cared more about substance than style. An NPR interview notes how much greater Mark Penn's business conflicts of interest were in comparison to other recent top campaign advisors like David Axelrod and Karl Rove.

Penn laid out his "strategy for winning" in a March 19, 2007, memo to the campaign. According to the memo, Penn believed Clinton's victory would be built upon a coalition of voters he called "Invisible Americans", a sort of reprise of Bill Clinton's "forgotten middle class", which would be composed of women and lower and middle class voters. Eventually it was this coalition that she ended up winning a year later. Penn wrote the "3 AM" advertisement that ran during the campaign, which was later named one of Times top 10 political ads of all time and was parodied on The Simpsons. Clinton followed this strategy. She would only apologize six years later in 2014.

Clinton was the front-runner in the early months of the Democratic primary, but in January 2008 she lost the Iowa caucus to then-Senator Barack Obama. On April 6, 2008, Penn agreed to step down as chief strategist when it was disclosed that he met with representatives of Colombia's government in his role as the CEO of Burson Marsteller, a firm hired to lobby on Colombia's behalf, creating a scandal for Clinton's campaign. It was suggested that he would remain in a similar though less formal role until the end of the campaign. As Secretary of State, Clinton ended up favoring the free-trade pact.

In May 2008, Times Karen Tumulty wrote that Penn thought the Democratic primaries were "winner-take-all", rather than allotted proportionally, citing anonymous sources who attended a Clinton strategy session with Penn in 2007. Senior Clinton staffer Harold Ickes is reported to have asked in frustration, "How can it possibly be that the much vaunted chief strategist doesn't understand proportional allocation?" Penn and Howard Wolfson, Clinton's communication director, both denied that the scene had taken place.

Clinton's campaign was hobbled by infighting among the staff, including much hostility towards Penn, and disagreement in strategy such as between Penn's strategy of going negative against Obama and other staff who wanted to maintain a positive campaign. From December 2008 to December 2009, Penn and Zalesne authored a regular online column for the Wall Street Journal called "Microtrends".

The New York Times raised questions about conflicts of interest in Penn's Wall Street Journal column and the rest of his career. New York Times reviewer Harry Hurt III described Microtrends as "a diligently researched tome chock-full of counterintuitive facts and findings" and "the perfect bible for a game of not-so-trivial pursuits concerning the hidden sociological truths of modern times...". On the other hand, Ezra Klein, writing for In These Times, described the book as "epically awful" and remarked that "If [Penn] is the pinnacle of his profession, then the profession uses numbers as a ruse – a superficial empiricism that obscures garden-variety hackery."

Rightward shift According to Politico, Penn has become disenchanted with the leftward shift in the Democratic Party. Philippe Reines suggested that Penn shouldered too much of the blame for Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential defeat. Bill Clinton described Penn's recent 2018-19 commentary as "sour grapes", suggesting "[Penn] wasn’t invited back into the campaign."

Defense of Donald Trump Throughout 2018 and 2019, Penn was vocal with his criticisms of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, regularly appearing on Fox News and contributing columns to The Hill in which he, in the words of Politico, "bashed" the probe and ensuing attempt to impeach then-President Donald Trump. Penn published several columns which criticized Mueller and political and legal adversaries of Trump. In online opinion columns, he alleged that Mueller and "Democratic-leaning lawyers" were acting improperly in trying to prepare a charge of obstruction of justice against Trump. The Daily Beast wrote that Penn had become one of Trump's biggest defenders in 2018.

Trump 2020 presidential campaign Penn met with Trump in February and November 2019 to discuss Trump's re-election campaign. After the latter meeting, Penn told The Washington Post, "It's the second time I have ever met with the President. I'm not counseling him. I'm not advising him." Penn also told the Post that his discussions with Trump concerned only data that was already publicly available.

2024 election commentary In an April 2023 op-ed, Penn outlined a path to victory for a presidential candidate to win through appeals to an educated, suburban base and expressed hope for Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis, citing, among other things, a motivation to prevent Trump from becoming president again.

Praise for X In 2025, Penn praised Twitter (officially known as X) as a "a revived and increasingly vibrant platform".

Polling Americans on their perspectives around vaccines As of September 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services is preparing to issue a no-bid contract to the polling firm HarrisX, which is part of Stagwell, a marketing company led by Penn. The poll will seek to "understand Americans' perspectives around vaccines and drivers of trust in making vaccine decisions".

Personal life Penn is married to Nancy Jacobson, the co-founder, board president and CEO of No Labels, a 501(c)4 political organization that advocates for centrism and bipartisanship.