TBWA\Chiat\Day New York has hired Nancy Reyes, who co-founded the now-defunct New York offices of Goodby, Silverstein and Partners, to serve as its new managing director.
As our Adweek colleagues report, she will fill the role vacated when Rob Schwartz was promoted to CEO last January. The news marks Schwartz’s biggest hire so far during his tenure at TBWA\Chiat\Day New York, and it also moves the larger organization closer to its goal of increasing the ranks of its female leadership by 20 percent before the year 2020.
Schwartz describes Reyes as “a great hire,” adding, “Nancy is a rare combination of leadership, creative taste and great business acumen. And she can easily put herself in any client’s shoes because she’s worked client side, too.”
Reyes spent most of her agency career at GS&P San Francisco, serving as group account director for nearly a decade before moving to New York to open the satellite office in 2013. After that office shuttered last summer, she moved clientside and served as VP of marketing creative at Verizon for approximately eight months, where she oversaw advertising, retail and social marketing for the wireless business under the “Better Matters” platform.
After graduating from Harvard, she began her career working in accounts at Ogilvy & Mather and DMB&B before moving to GS&P in 2003.
Her hire follows a string of wins for TBWA New York including SportChek and GoDaddy, which had been with Barton F. Graf.
Side note: Last June, Reyes and ECD Paul Caiozzo told us that Goodby’s New York office would not be closing after multiple parties sent us contrary information. Jeff Goodby himself then insisted that the NYC operation would remain open (it closed six weeks later, with principals naming the failed Time Warner/Comcast merger as a primary cause).
For the record, we don’t hold it against Jeff for making us look bad that one time, we find Paul to be a very cool guy IRL and we have no doubt that Schwartz made a good choice with his latest hire.