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 graduated from Horace Mann School in New York City in 1972.

He conducted his first poll, which determined that the Horace Mann faculty was more liberal than was the country at large on the issue of civil rights, when he was 13, as well as polling classmates about sex and drugs.

Penn entered Harvard University in 1972.

According to his brother, Penn was initially rejected but was able to get Harvard's dean to reverse their decision after taking the train to Boston and arguing his case.

At Harvard, Penn majored in political science and, as a city editor of the Harvard Crimson, wrote and reported 99 articles.

His work for the paper included reporting and analysis on 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.

Penn graduated from Harvard College in 1976.

Penn and his future business partner, Doug Schoen, started Penn & Schoen – now the global market research firm Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates – in their dorm room.

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.

By creating this "overnight poll" system, Penn allowed the campaign to conduct polls to determine messages and evaluate tactics on a daily basis, a tactical advantage that contributed to Koch's eventual victory over Cuomo.

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.

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 1981, Penn & Schoen conducted polling for Menachem Begin's campaign for re-election as Prime Minister of Israel.

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'd developed on Ed Koch's first campaign for mayor to provide Begin with a daily understanding of attitudes of the Israeli electorate.

Ultimately, Begin defeated Labor, led by Shimon Peres, by 10,405 votes out of more than 1.5 million cast.

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.

In 1993, Penn, Schoen & Berland was engaged by AT&T's new advertising agency FCB to guide a response to MCI's "Friends and Family" plan, a then-upstart competitor for AT&T's long-distance services.

To help AT&T understand how best to counter MCI's strongest messages, Penn created the "mall testing" methodology for competitive advertising research.

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, consulting on his presidential campaign, and alleging a "deep state" conspiracy against him.

Penn was born in New York City and raised in Riverdale.

His father was a Lithuanian immigrant 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.