Ellen Praytor Faulkner: CEO, Lewis Communications

Industry pioneer works to benefit clients and her agency for future success.

by Lindsay Mott Fletcher
photography by Stephen Savage

Ellen Praytor Faulkner’s story begins with a visual communications degree in design. After an internship in Washington, D.C., a trip to Europe and working at the beach, she was looking for a place to start her career and accepted an account executive position with Mobile Bay Monthly with the intention to become the art director. She obtained this role but realized her passion was actually in sales and marketing, so she became the magazine’s director of Sales and Marketing.

She had respect for Lewis Communications, and when the owners decided to sell, she interviewed for an account coordinator position that paid half her salary at the time. “I had no agency experience, but I worked hard, learned the business and relied on my love of marketing and advertising to rise quickly through the ranks,” Faulkner said. Within 10 years, she was running the Mobile office, and three years ago, she became Lewis’ first female CEO.

As the team at Lewis Mobile was getting settled into its new office space at 500 St. Louis Street, Faulkner (EPF) took some time to talk with your author (LMF) about the firm, her role in it and the future.

LMF: You’re the firm’s first female CEO. What do you think it was about you that made you right for this role at that time and now?

EPF: I was voted in as CEO a little over three years ago. My previous role of senior vice president/managing director (MD) was centered around profitability and growth of our business, but what really prepared me was learning to balance strategic vision with operational execution while maintaining our creative culture. I wasn’t expecting the role at all! While being a woman may have helped my chances, I’m proud to say that women and women leadership in our company are actually in the majority —which is not the case for our industry. Women represent less than 10% of ownership of advertising agencies. The reality of being a member of this small percentage is quite humbling, but also quite sobering. I’m a member of a national group called OwnIt, working to bring awareness to this circumstance, lead change and mentor other women to ensure this number rises quickly and dramatically. Women thrive in our industry and should be in majority ownership. I’m hoping to play a meaningful part in making that a reality.

LMF: Tell me more about the history of the company.

EPF: Our company was founded in 1951 by Jack Lewis on Jackson Street in downtown Mobile. The agency evolved through strategic partnerships when Jack’s son, John Lewis, joined forces with Emil Graf and Larry Norris to purchase the company. Larry’s vision for growth led him to establish our Birmingham office 37 years ago, followed quickly by Nashville. As ownership evolved, I was able to step into the MD role for the Mobile office. Larry later wholly acquired the agency. Today, our owner group reflects our multi-market strength and includes Larry Norris, chairman of the Board, and my fellow owners who are in Nashville — Robert Froedge — and Birmingham — Val Holman, Spencer Till and Carlton Wood.

LMF: Tell me about the Mobile team and your approach to creativity and serving your clients’ needs.

EPF: We have approximately 30 team members in the Mobile office and around 100 across the agency. While Lewis was known nationally and internationally primarily as a creative and branding firm for years — about 10 years ago, we fundamentally changed how we approach our clients’ success. What that means is we don’t just create beautiful ads or clever campaigns. We dig deep into our clients’ actual business challenges and revenue goals. We work directly with CEOs and business owners to understand what keeps them up at night; then, we build marketing strategies that solve those real problems and drive measurable growth. We do this through three core commitments:

• Maintaining direct relationships with our clients’ leadership teams
• Ensuring every major creative project gets reviewed by our senior team regardless of which office handles it
• And, most importantly — proving our work drives real business results, not just marketing metrics. We’ve learned that business owners need to see immediate returns before they’ll invest in long-term brand building. So we deliver both: campaigns that increase sales this quarter and strategies that build lasting value. When our clients’ businesses grow, we grow. It’s that simple, and it’s why we’ve built such strong, long-term partnerships.

LMF: Tell me about the decision to move into a new space downtown.

EPF: Lewis Mobile was located in a beautiful Midtown home for 37 years. While it was gorgeous, it really wasn’t conducive for the workings of an advertising agency today. We’ve been looking for years to move and restore a building downtown. Larry had actually put in an offer years ago for the building where our location is now at 500 St. Louis Street. We are thrilled with our new location. We love our neighbors, and we love being downtown. It has brought new energy to our working environment. We wanted to create a space where people wanted to come to work every day. We have outside patios, a workout room, a grandstand with a huge TV, several small and large working spaces and lots of really cool nuances.

Our team members are what make Lewis great, and our goal is to provide them with the best. They deserve it. So, we renovated 500 St. Louis Street, centered around what we believed our team members wanted and would enjoy. Larry led this effort 100%. He is brilliant, and he was driven to ensure that our team members had a working environment that inspired and invigorated them on all fronts. We 100% believe he succeeded.

LMF: How do you stay ahead of trends like AI in such a fast-moving industry?

EPF: Thank goodness Lewis is full of curious, eager and constant learners. It truly takes that type of individual to thrive in the advertising and marketing business today. We are constantly working to improve in all areas — especially client value creation and creating great work. We are utilizing AI to create more tangible business growth for our clients in ways that directly impact our growth and theirs. We are literally utilizing AI in every part of our business in areas like accounting, workflow, graphics, design, video, copywriting, client research, strategy and more. There are new LLM chatbots available almost daily. We are utilizing AI individually, with our world partner network called the ICOM Agency Network — from France to Malta to Spain to Australia and throughout North America — to work to stay ahead of the curve in how we utilize AI. Our goal is to utilize AI in pursuit of building the best agency of the future.

LMF: Tell me about some projects of which you’re especially proud.

EPF: Our work with the Kentucky Bourbon Trail World Toast has won numerous awards and accolades across the globe. We’re extremely proud of it, for sure. We definitely stepped out of our comfort zone. One project I’m particularly excited about is our partnership with Always.bank, a national online banking institution, which began last year. When we came onboard, we were driven by CEO Steve Smith’s compelling vision to build a fundamentally different kind of bank designed specifically for small businesses and their unique challenges.

LMF: Does your team collaborate with the other Lewis offices? Is this a benefit or a challenge?

EPF: We absolutely collaborate with all three offices in Birmingham, Nashville and Mobile. We also have several fully remote team members. While the distance can certainly create challenges at times, COVID eliminated much of the previous barriers.

Having three offices benefits the agency, our team members and our clients. For our clients, we are able to source talent from multiple locations who are experts in our clients’ industry and their specific marketing needs. For our employees, they are able to grow by learning from all 100 team members, and they also have the opportunity to shift locations easily. We have had several team members move from one office to the next for various personal reasons or just because they loved that location. Mobile has the beach. Nashville is Music City. And Birmingham is a foodie town. From the agency perspective, we truly have the most talented group of committed and passionate individuals we have ever had. The energy and synergy are contagious — especially when our team members are visiting and collaborating in the other offices. It is fun to watch the momentum of our teams doing great things together.

LMF: Beyond the recent move, are there any upcoming changes/new things in the works for Lewis?

EPF: We are continuing to raise the profile of our company across the country. We have lots of things in the works. Several of our leaders are involved in national and international conferences and networks.

We entered our first Cannes Lions Awards this year with the Kentucky Bourbon Trail work we did. I and two other team members attended this festival in June in France. While in Cannes, I did a live “Tiny Terrace Talk” with Raven PR and Breaking and Entering Media. We are continually participating in areas that are pushing us out of our comfort zone, and we believe it’s working to help raise our profile. In the past year, we have been involved in, featured in or attended conferences around the world with entities like Ad Age, Advertising Week, World Whiskey Association, ICOM Network, Mirren Live, Association of National Advertisers and many more. Yet the most rewarding things in the works will be to continue to grow our team members and clients’ businesses. We have great partnerships where we are so entrenched with our clients’ businesses that we feel the responsibility to build their business as if it were our own. The most exciting part is building our existing clients’ businesses and seeing what new business we can help build. We love the challenge. We like to win. We are extremely competitive for ourselves and for our clients. I can’t wait for what’s next in how we are winning for our team members, our clients and for Lewis.

LMF: Where do you see the future of communications heading, and what excites you most about that future?

EPF: I love our business, but the one constant about the future of communications is change. Evolution is fascinating. AI is even more fascinating. I believe that those who shy away from AI will be obsolete very soon. Those who embrace AI will thrive. AI is functional. Communicators create “ahas!” from the data from AI. It makes us quicker and smarter, but it needs strategic thinkers, innovators and change makers. Our goal at Lewis is to evolve with the industry in order to continue to grow our team members and our clients’ business.

LMF: What does long-term success look like for you personally and for Lewis as a whole?

EPF: At Lewis, we believe that growth is beautiful. To me, success is about growth for our team members and our clients. For me personally, I am definitely growing every single day. I truly learn 10 new things a day. I like to say: “I’ve learned so much the hard way, I should be brilliant.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way, but I do believe nothing great is easy. And growth involves discomfort but also the magic that comes from the tension and the hard stuff.

My long-term goal is to set up our team members to be leaders and to take over my job. We have the most awesome people and it’s already happening. Growth for me means working myself out of a job and letting our very tenacious, brilliant and innovative leaders take the helm. 

We don’t have a defined timeline for that, but nothing could make me happier than seeing the next generation of owners and leaders of Lewis killing it far into the future.