Today the Detroit offices of McCann Worldgroup announced the hiring of Bill Cimino as chief creative officer.
Moving forward, Cimino will head up the McCann Motor City team along with Jeff Cruz, who became creative lead at MRM//McCann early this year after serving as ECD and associate partner at VSA. While there, he helped open the Detroit office and led creative on Harley Davidson. The release positions the hires as a rejuvenation of McCann’s operations in Detroit.
McCann global creative chairman Rob Reilly said, “Bill has done really great work on big brands his entire career,” adding, “More importantly, he is an outstanding person. I couldn’t think of a better individual to lead and mentor the creative teams in a part of the country that is becoming more and more vital to our overall plan.”
Commonwealth//McCann CEO/chairman Bill Kolb, who was also promoted to president of diversified agencies at McCann Worldgroup in January, said, “Adding Bill to our Detroit team puts another key creative leader in place as we continue to elevate the level of our creative product across all of McCann Worldgroup Detroit. This is the next important step in moving our business forward and working to attain our ambitious growth and creative objectives.”
Cimino brings a long history of leading midwestern creative departments to the new job. He has spent more than a quarter century in the agency world including nearly two decades at DDB Chicago, where he spent two stints leading the Anheuser Busch and McDonald’s accounts, respectively. The release notes that DDB won 13 Cannes Lions over 5 years under his leadership and that the Chicago Advertising Federation named Y&R its 2014 Creative Agency of the Year while he was chief creative officer there.
Cimino worked at Y&R Chicago from 2012 to 2015, departing in January of that year as the shop promoted ECDs Pam Mufson and Jeremy Smallwood to take his place.
Since then he has been freelancing after spending some time as a creative consultant with Pizza Hut; recent projects including working with OKRP on its Groupon account. When flying to Chicago over the weekend, Cimino called McCann “the new chapter” in an already extensive career.