Leslie Diard

Communications planning director
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While one supposes it’s important to tell you that Leslie Diard is our deeply experienced communications planning director and a sage member of the management committee, one can barely wait to tell you she started her professional life as a purchasing agent for Shell Oil in Houston, wore a hard hat to work and visited offshore drilling platforms, where she was often the sole female. Since then, Leslie has veered sharply toward the marketing mainstream, serving as a senior media planner at Foote, Cone & Belding/San Francisco, as a VP, group account director, at Hawk Media and as media director at Swirl.

Her pre-D/C client experience includes Taco Bell, Dreyer’s Ice Cream, MGM Grand Hotel & Casino, Pearle Vision and The Wine Group. And at D/C, she oversees a ten-person communications planning department that is responsible for the planning and purchasing of media for, among others, StubHub, John Muir Medical Center and Hard Rock Hotels and Cafes. Leslie has an MBA from the renowned Thunderbird School of Global Management.

She is also a former professor at the Art Institute of California, and, in recent years, was elected president of the American Marketing Association, San Francisco chapter. A season ticket holder to the SF Symphony (la-di-da), she is married to an Englishman – but not Eric Clapton, whom she once talked to on the phone (long story).