New York’s Johannes Leonardo confirmed what an anonymous source told us this morning: CEO Michael Duda will soon be leaving the agency.
JL, which most recently made headlines for winning marketing duties for Playstation’s Vue streaming TV service, hired Duda to fill the chief executive role back in November of 2013.
While he spent the nearly five years leading up to that hire at marketing management consultancy Consigliere Brand Capital (which he co-founded), he will be best known to our readers for the years he spent within the Deutsch organization.
After joining Deutsch in 2001 as SVP/director of business development, he worked across the shop’s New York and LA offices, eventually rising to the position of partner/chief corporate strategy officer.
Here’s the statement from JL founders/CCOs Jan Jacobs and Leo Premutico:
Johannes Leonardo has gone through a tremendous period of growth, but more importantly, the right kind of growth. So we will celebrate the work we accomplished together with Mike and wish him the best in his next chapter, as we look to scale and expand our offering with our new management team.
We don’t know where Duda is going, though our sources tell us he’s accepted an executive position elsewhere and that the agency will soon announce his replacement.
We reached out to Duda directly for comment but have yet to hear back from him.