Millard's Leaving Martha Stewart Means One Less Chef in the Kitchen

Not that surprising to read this morning that Wenda Harris Millard was leaving what, on paper, looks like a dream job -- co-CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia -- to become president of media and entertainment advisory firm MediaLink. Not only has The New York Post been hinting recently of trouble between Millard and company founder Stewart, but Millard, whom I've known for years, is a woman who sticks to her guns; it's easy to see friction between her and Stewart, who is at least as well known for her tempestuous personality as she is for her tapenade. (Robin Marino, who has a merchandising background, is now sole CEO.)

Even if the company has a spare CEO in Marino, is Millard's departure a loss for the company? Certainly. The relentlessly upbeat Millard is among the rarest of the rare -- an ad sales executive who has deep on- and off-line experience, having served once upon a time as publisher of both Adweek (where I first met her) and Family Circle, and as chief sales officer at Yahoo, where she helped bring the company back from another instance where it was on the brink before leaving amidst last year's rash of departures. Fifteen years into the Internet revolution, sad to say, senior executives who have successfully bridged both sides of the media business are still few and far between. And Millard's isn't the only recent high-level defection from the ad sales team at Martha Stewart --just last week, the company lost executive vp/ad sales Jacki Kelley (who followed Millard to MSLO from Yahoo) to media agency Universal McCann, where she was named North American president.

You could argue that the departures have to do with lackluster results recently. However, though the company's year-end numbers won't be released until next week, through the third quarter, I'd argue that the company was weathering the storm fairly well, by leveraging the cross platform strengths that are both Millard's and MSLO's to offset trouble spots. Overall revenue was off by four percent to $66.5 million, with publishing off by 18 percent, or $11.7 million, a not unexpected performance in the beleaguered magazine segment. However, gains in Internet advertising and broadcast made up much of the difference, with the two contributing $6.3 million more than they did a year earlier; merchandising kicked in an additional $2.6 million from the year-ago period. (I'm excluding $1 million in revenue that had been accounted for under "Internet" in previous years and now is tallied up under "Merchandising.")

Now that I look at the numbers more closely, what strikes me as funny about the earnings release is that it plays up the contributions of Marino's merchandising unit first, even though it's clear the non-print media properties contributed more to the company's performance. Given New York Post reports that Marino and Stewart get along "fabulously", while Millard and Stewart did not, I'll simply say that's interesting.