Ogilvy has seen a few department leaders leave in recent months as it continues a large-scale reorganization of its North American network.
Most prominently, head of planning Colin Drummond went to Omnicom’s dedicated AT&T division in Los Angeles last month.
As reported in Adweek today, he will co-lead strategy on that account along with Angela Jones, who led planning on all West Coast accounts at WPP’s Maxus.
According to a leader of the AT&T account, BBDO, Hearts & Science and Organic have been building this team gradually since the client acquired DirecTV and consolidated its U.S. creative and media business with Omnicom. He described it as “a new model based on what we created post-pitch in terms of our service model for AT&T.”
Drummond’s departure followed the summer hire of Steve Zaroff, a McCann veteran who is now chief strategy officer. US head of planning Antonis Kocheilas now reports to Zaroff, and a team of 8 or 9 as-yet-unannounced strategy leads will in turn report to him.
It also preceded former head of experiential work Kim DeNapoli’s September move to FCB, where she is now running the FCBX practice.
We’ve also learned that executive director of content production Jenny Gadd, who formerly led that department at Johannes Leonardo, resigned last week. It’s not yet clear where she’s headed, though the agency is actively looking to replace both her and DeNapoli.
The Ogilvy organization has spent much of this year following up on CEO John Seifert’s January announcement that it would be going through a “next chapter” restructuring designed to unite international teams under four “functions” while arranging the U.S. network under a single leadership team and a unified P&L model in an attempt to become more “client-centric.”
In August, Joe Sciarrotta and Alfonso Marian were named co-chief creative officers in the U.S.