9thWonder, the Houston-based media and creative content agency which grew out of agency collective The Company and officially launched last month, has hired Jim “Wegs” Wegerbauer as partner, global planning lead.
“9thWonder solves a lot of problems that have plagued advertising for 20 years and left clients paying for an empty promise of seamless teams and solutions,” Wegerbauer said in a statement. “It’s a network that actually works, because it’s a true partnership. No way was I going to pass up that chance, and I can already see that we’re delivering on what we’re selling.”
Wegerbauer will be responsible for developing unifying strategy for 9thWonder and keeping strategy central to all agency efforts. He will work closely with partner, global strategy lead Lisa DePoy and joins a leadership team that also includes CEO Jose Lozano and global creative lead Tony Stern.
Wegerbauer joins the agency from GSD&M, where he has served as vice president, group strategy director for around a year, working across Southwest Airlines, Popeyes Chicken, Fiesta Mart and new business efforts. Before joining GSD&M, he spent six years at Dieste, most recently serving as chief idea officer.
At Dieste, he wrote “1 + 1 = 3: Changing the Equation with the Booming Hispanic Market” and founded multicultural newspaper Provoke Weekly. His prior agency experience includes LatinWorks, TM Advertising and The Richards Group and he also spent three years as director of creativity and planning for the NBA’s Houston Rockets.
“Wegs brings extraordinary experience to support the extraordinary promise we’re making to clients – that we’ll bring the full spectrum of expertise to bear on advancing their businesses by celebrating the amazing role their products play in people’s lives,” Lozano said in a statement.
“In bringing people from every discipline onto all our accounts, we’re actually doing the kind of multidisciplinary work that gets promised but seldom delivered. Wegs not only thinks across disciplines, he has experience in them all working on a vast range of businesses confronting the challenge of sameness. He will help us accelerate the collaboration at the core of our model.”