Veteran creative/art director Rob Rasmussen, who spent time at Wieden+Kennedy, JWT, R/GA, BBH, Tribal Worldwide and more, will soon leave his current position as chief creative officer at content marketing agency Story Worldwide.
While agency and creative leader will not part ways immediately, Rasmussen and co-CEO Kirk Cheyfitz (himself a veteran of Campbell Ewald and MRM) tell us that he will gradually step away from his role.
Rasmussen joined the shop in question in 2013 after leaving what was then called Tribal DDB (where he was the first CCO) in the summer of 2012. At the time, he told AdAge that he wanted to make a change by freelancing and then joining a marketing shop founded by two publishing veterans rather than a traditional ad agency:
“I thought I wouldn’t want to go into any advertising agency as they exist, or go and try to fix somebody else’s advertising agency.”
Story Worldwide has hired other agency guys like Josh Golden, former Grey New York chief digital officer and Story CMO who recently scored a global VP of marketing gig at Xerox. But it’s not quite an ad agency. As noted in the AdAge piece, much of Story’s work involves what its name implies–brand storytelling outside your standard broadcast/digital campaigns. Rasmussen was the organization’s first chief creative officer, and he tells us that “we…haven’t been an AOR or a full-service agency.”
Now, the CCO says that the present has “never been a better time for me to take a step back” as newer hires take the reins and he considers the next phase in his career.
This means that he will leave his current position, though he will be “connected to [Story Worldwide] at least until the end of the year.” He calls the move “the nicest way to slowly say goodbye” and says that he and Cheyfitz will “always be close working friends. You find that in this industry more than you find it in advertising, per se.”
Story Worldwide has no immediate plans to replace Rasmussen.