PHD Hires First U.S. Head of Commerce From Bayer

Omnicom Media Group's PHD looked outside the agency world to hire its first U.S. head of commerce. In the latest agency investment into commerce practices, PHD hired Sarah Clayton in the role, tasked with leading the expansion of the commerce practice and ensuring alignment with the retail marketplace as the U.S. gradually moves past the pandemic. Clayton joins PHD from Bayer, where she spent the past six years in consumer products marketing and brand management roles at Bayer Consumer Healthcare. "2020 delivered consumer behavior changes that will permanently impact the sales funnel. Meeting the consumer with the right message at the right point in the journey, from attention to transaction, has never been more critical and complex," Clayton said in a statement, adding PHD will focus on "delivering best-in-class commerce experiences" for its clients. PHD U.S. CEO Catherine Sullivan (who was promoted to the role last September after four years leading Omnicom Media Group's audience-first investment approach) told Adweek that while the agency values elevating talent within the Omnicom organization, it was also important to bring in talent from outside the network, given the rate of transformation in the commerce space. "Bringing in outside perspective and leadership helps us all get smarter," Sullivan said. "The more we talked about her experiences on the client side, it was clear that the company's maturation was further down the line in commerce, and she emerged as a great leader." Sullivan added that it's important to have a team "that consistently works together," adding, "I knew she would really gel with the rest of my team. She's collaborative and I knew her personality would connect with our other leaders." Inside Google’s Plan to Make Ecommerce More ‘Interesting’ A decade of change in 15 months Ecommerce was easily the biggest retail trend of 2020, as consumers spent $861.12 billion online with U.S. merchants last year, up 44% from 2019, according to research firm Digital Commerce 360. Sullivan told Adweek that PHD has seen "a decade's worth of transformation," as the agency had been imagining how ecommerce might evolve over the next several years prior to the pandemic and was planning to introduce a dedicated commerce practice in that timeframe. The pandemic quickly accelerated its development. "We didn’t have a commerce practice going into Covid," she added. "We have one coming out of it." Sullivan said that PHD's operations are organized around four pillars designed to work hand-in-hand to deliver end-to-end solutions for clients: audience, culture, commerce and content. "We want to understand where they intersect and why, [and] to expand that media plan from beginning to end," she said. "We have to continue connecting those dots to ensure clients understand why we're moving from one to another," she added, explaining that better understanding of audiences had evolved media buying and planning strategies away from a reliance on segmentation to focus more on reaching a multicultural audience with timely content driven by cultural insights. PHD's creation of the U.S. head of commerce role is the latest in a series of agency investments in ecommerce capabilities around the industry, coming less than two months after WPP media agency network GroupM appointed Andrew Ruegger as its first global commerce lead.