- Steve McClellan

NEW YORK Serge Del Grosso has joined Havas' MPG as evp, managing director in charge of the shop's $450 million Sears account, which MPG won last year after a review.

Del Grosso, who reports to MPG U.S. chief operating officer Steve Lanzano, succeeds Kaki Hinton, who has resigned for personal reasons, the company said.

Del Grosso will be based in New York, but will be spending a lot of time in Chicago, where the Sears account is based.

Del Grosso joined MPG from Lowe New York, where he was managing director of media strategy. His responsibilities there included the management of strategic media planning across all of Lowe New York's clients including Ricoh, Perdue Farms and Regent Hotels, among others.

Prior to Lowe, Serge was director of media at Sony Electronics, where he led the planning and placement of $100 million in advertising across various brands including Wega televisions, Vaio computers and Cybershot digital cameras. He won Sony's in-house 2005 Marketing Innovation Award for his work developing innovative cross-platform partnerships with major media properties such as NFL on CBS, Summer Olympics on NBC, Nascar on NBC/TNT and The Jimmy Kimmel Show on ABC.

Earlier in his career, he held positions at Organic, CBS, Verizon predecessor company Nynex and Young & Rubicam.

MPG won the Sears Holdings account in May of last year, beating out incumbents MindShare and MEC Interaction, both units of WPP Group, Aegis Group's Carat; and independent Horizon Media. The win also included K-Mart, which continues to be overseen at MPG by David Handelman, who joined the shop last October from MindShare Chicago, where he worked on the Sears account. Hinton was previously vp, advertising services at the Johnson & Johnson Consumer Group before joining MPG last October.