CPB Hires GSD&M President Marianne Malina as Global CEO

CPB has a new global chief executive as the agency embraces change for a new era. The MDC Partners agency hired Marianne Malina as global CEO following Erik Sollenberg's departure from CPB last month. Malina will take on the role effective May 17, joining a CPB leadership team that includes CCO Jorge Calleja, who recently joined CPB from Blizzard Entertainment, and managing director Ryan Skubic. Malina previously spent over two decades with Austin-based Omnicom agency GSD&M, where she served as president since 2012. She was among agency leaders driving the national Time's Up initiative, which promoted gender equality and representation within the industry. "We're at a pivotal time in the business, for CPB and for female leaders," Malina told Adweek. "It is our time to step up and make progress. This gives me an opportunity and platform to take everything I've learned and take it to the nth degree." Over the course of her career with GSD&M, Malina rose from an account supervisor to agency president and touched every department at the agency. She played an instrumental role in rebuilding GSD&M over the past decade and leading work for clients including Capital One, Dodge, Harry's, Jeep, PetSmart and Walmart. "That is a place that is all about opportunity and has given me more opportunities than I thought possible. I leave with a tremendous amount of gratitude," Malina said. MDC's Constellation gets a new star Malina arrives at the agency following a year that began with agency co-founder Alex Bogusky leaving after a stint as chief creative engineer. It concluded with Domino's ending a 13-year relationship with CPB and Infiniti moving its creative account to a dedicated global unit within Publicis Groupe. Like many agencies, CPB was also impacted by client budget reductions during the pandemic and went through a round of furloughs and layoffs last April. "CPB has always stood for disruptive and effective marketing, and this appointment underscores our commitment to bringing the agency every resource it needs to grow and succeed," MDC Partners chairman and CEO Mark Penn said in a statement. Under Penn, CPB joined other network shops including 72andSunny, to form a collective of MDC Partners agencies called Constellation last February. Last December, MDC Partners agreed to merge with Stagwell Group, a network Penn founded in 2015. "This is an entrepreneurship; it's building from the ground up. You get to question everything," 72andSunny creative co-chair John Boiler, who serves as chair for Constellation, told Adweek. "[Malina] was throwing ideas out there questioning all of the status quo our industry had put in place. We share a belief that the most diverse talent creates more unexpected and unmissable work, and that drives our clients' business." Writing CPB's next chapter Malina is excited to help lead CPB globally into a new area, not just for the Boulder-based agency but the industry as a whole. "CPB is an agency that has changed our industry for the better. There is not a CEO or person working in advertising that has not taken a cue from CPB over the decades. That progresses and moves our industry forward and that's what I'm really attracted to," she said. As Malina turns the page on a new era, she's committed to embracing the best of the shop's core while ensuring its next chapter progresses the plot. "Culture is the heart of creativity," she said. "This is a culture that goes in and deconstructs, brings a point of view that no one else does. Those are the parts of culture that we'll retain. We're going to have a modern, relevant culture." That will entail embracing the more distributed pool of talent enabled by the collapsing boundaries of remote work from the top down. Currently based in Austin, Texas, Malina has no intention of relocating. "CPB will be the most diverse, most distributed talent agency in the business. That is exactly how you build a modern culture. This is an industry as a whole that needs to bring more people into the fold and being distributed [will allow for that]," she said. Boiler and Malina were each optimistic about the potential to attract both new talent and clients in the year ahead and intend to aggressively pursue new business opportunities. "This will be a magnetic pole for folks who want to do something different," Malina said. MDC Partners Agencies Form Collective Comprised of 72andSunny, CPB, Hecho Studios, Instrument and Redscout