Last week we ran a fascinating post on William John “Bill” Grizack, a veteran agency strategist who confessed to defrauding The Variable and McKinney over a period of six months in 2012-2013 by faking a round of new business deals worth an estimated $269 million.
Today we have additional information on Mr. Grizack: his most recent employer was Interbrand, or “the world’s leading brand management consultancy.” A statement from New York-based Interbrand, which is part of the Omnicom Network:
“William Grizack worked at Interbrand for a very short period, but is no longer employed here.”
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Details on Grizack’s stint at Interbrand remain somewhat sparse at this time. No records of Omnicom hiring him exist online, and he did not add the company to his Facebook or LinkedIn profiles, both of which list his most recent employer as West Hollywood’s Dailey Advertising.
But a source tells us that he joined Interbrand last September, the same month he claims to have left Dailey. The same source says his title was Senior Director, a job that pays nearly $200K. (Given his history, we presume that role would have been senior director of strategy or senior strategic consultant.)
We also hear that Interbrand only fired him last week, which would be the same week that he pleaded guilty to three Class C felonies related to “obtaining property on false pretenses” in a Winston-Salem, North Carolina court. We have asked for more information from Interbrand and will update this post if we receive it.
Grizack’s family still appears to live in the Boulder, Colorado area, where he moved in spring of 2013 to work as an executive director at Egg Strategy. According to the prosecutor in the North Carolina case (who did not speak to the press), that agency also fired Grizack after discovering that he had “falsified a $14 million contract with McDonald’s.”
His LinkedIn page continues to list McDonald’s as one of the accounts he managed during his year-plus stint at Egg. After our story ran last week, he made his Twitter account private.
We have begun reaching out to all the agencies involved in this story, and we have also acquired all of the publicly available documents from the case in North Carolina.
UPDATE: Dailey Advertising has responded to our request for comment on Grizack. From president and CEO Tom Lehr:
“Bill Grizack was with Dailey for a short period of time. Our agency has always been about integrity and transparency in how we deal with one another and our clients, and like most of the ad community, we were shocked by the reports of his previous actions.”
We specifically asked the agency for more information on the circumstances surrounding Grizack’s arrival and departure, but Lehr tells us that this will be his agency’s only statement on the matter.