Harvey Marco, the chief creative officer of WPP’s dedicated Garage Team Mazda unit and former CCO of J. Walter Thompson New York, will soon leave the agency.
According to our sources, he is leaving of his own accord and has not accepted a specific job with another organization. The Garage Team Mazda organization does not plan to name his successor at this time.
Marco has spent more than 20 years in the ad industry, starting his career at Ammirati & Puris and GS&P and moving to Fallon as an art director before accepting an executive-level role running the Toyota account at Saatchi & Saatchi L.A. After more than 5 years there, he headed to New York as JWT’s chief creative officer, reporting to Ty Montague and Rosemarie Ryan before they left to launch co:collective. In a subsequent Adweek Q&A, Marco called the move away from Saatchi “bittersweet” and discussed JWT leadership’s plans for “the integration of offline and online creative.”
Marco has been leading creative at Garage Team since its inception in 2010, when WPP picked him to return to his West Coast roots and run the operation dedicated to an account that was then valued at $25 million. (Ryan Kutscher and Matt MacDonald took over at JWT almost two years later.)
Representatives for Garage Team Mazda have not yet responded to our requests for comment, but several sources with direct knowledge of the matter tell us Marco announced that he would be leaving the WPP organization at the end of last week. The reasons for his departure are not yet clear, though at least one party hints at plans to launch a new operation in Southern California.
Garage Team Mazda’s most visible recent work has been the “Driver’s Life” campaign narrated by Aaron Paul, and last month saw the release of “The Driver in All of Us,” a three-minute film profiling both amateur and professional drivers.
[Image via Mazda]