Co Collective Poaches R/GA's Lisco

Co Collective, the startup brand consultancy led by Rosemarie Ryan and Ty Montague, has poached R/GA’s Conrad Lisco to steer social media marketing.

Lisco, group director of social media at R/GA, will be head of community experience at Co Collective, reporting to Ryan and Montague, a Co representative confirmed. He starts April 4.

At R/GA in New York, Lisco, 28, worked on clients such as Nike and Walmart. He spent about a year at the Interpublic Group shop and is seen as a leading practitioner in the nascent field of social media marketing.

“A lot of what we are doing with clients involves actually helping them restructure themselves for the networked world,” said Montague, co-CEO at Co Collective in New York. “Conrad’s expertise in the social media space and, specifically, the work he has been doing with big brands like Walmart make him the perfect person to head this new practice area for us.”

Working with R/GA, Walmart grew its Facebook fan base to nearly 2.5 million from 40,000 in 12 months.

Lisco described his role at Co Collective as “helping brands develop new competencies in order to support new, networked communications . . . in owned and co-owned social channels and platforms.”

In 2009, Lisco and Richard Schatzberger launched Town Holler as a means for uniting active Foursquare users at live events. (Schatzberger is head of technology experience at Co Collective.) Lisco also is an active blogger.

Before R/GA, Lisco was a strategy director at mobile marketing shop 5th Finger. Other agency experience includes Crispin Porter + Bogusky (where he worked on Volkswagen), Kirshenbaum Bond + Partners and Berlin Cameron United.