We Hear: CP+B Vet Clemans Out at Colangelo

By Patrick Coffee 

colangelo logo 2We’ve yet to receive a statement from the agency, but multiple sources tell us that Dave Clemans is no longer executive creative director at Omnicom’s Colangelo Synergy Marketing.

Clemans joined the Darien, Connecticut-based shop less than two years ago after spending a year and a half as ECD at Taxi’s New York office; both the recent appointment and the previous one earned writeups in Adweek.

The agency, which counts Unilever, Pepsi, the NFL, and others among its past/current clients and focuses primarily on “promotions and shopper marketing” rather than traditional creative, developed the position for Clemans before he joined in the Summer of 2013.

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At the time, he told Noreen O’Leary that “brands realize they need a lot of disciplines so we’re trying to figure out how to make this work for them.”

Clemans began his career in the creative department at Crispin and spent time at both GS&P and The Martin Agency before moving into the ECD position at CHI&Partners. He held that role for more than two years and then joined Taxi, which he left amidst a larger executive shakeup led by the departure of Durk Barnhill (now CEO of Saatchi New York).

Clemans was one of many who worked on the VW account at CP+B; other notable projects include Best Buy, Virgin, Burger King’s European campaigns, and Crispin’s anti-tobacco work.

Again, the agency has yet to respond to our requests for comment on why its director left or whether it looks to replace him, though one of our sources claims that his abrupt departure was part of a series of as-yet-unannounced layoffs and that it arose from a client-side conflict. Yet another source tells us that tensions within the agency’s creative department contributed to the move.

Updates if we get them.

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