-By Steve McClellan

NEW YORK Interpublic Group's Initiative has hired Jennifer Nyhan as vp, group account director to run the shop's Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages business.

Initiative won the account in January after a review. Mediaedge:cia was the incumbent. For the first 11 months of 2007 the client spent $80 million on ads according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus. The 2006 total spend was approximately $140 million, per Nielsen.

Nyhan will be based in Los Angeles and report to Alan Cohen, president of Initiative's West Coast operations. Nyhan and Cohen have known each other since their days at the ABC TV, where she was vp, advertising and marketing, reporting to Cohen, who was evp, of marketing, advertising and promotion.
 
Most recently, Nyhan was senior account director at Impact Marketing & Promotions, where she developed creative concepts and oversaw campaigns for clients like Apple, MSN Mobile and Virgin America Airlines.

"Jennifer is a highly effective marketing executive with senior management experience at both the client and agency level," Cohen said in a statement. "She has a strong media, creative and marketing background, and has repeatedly proven capable of directing in-house staff and outside agencies to produce a large volume of first-rate work under tight deadlines."

Prior to ABC, Nyhan was manager of national media and affiliate promotion at Fox, where she was part of the in-house team that successfully launched five nights of new programming.