Havas Worldwide Chicago Promotes Tatia Torrey to Chief Client Officer

By Erik Oster 

Havas Worldwide Chicago promoted Tatia Torrey to the role of chief client officer, Adweek reports, noting that with the promotion half of Havas Worldwide Chicago’s leadership team is now female. In the new role, Torrey will work across the agency and subsidiaries Havas helia, Havas Latino and Havas Impact, overseeing a staff of around 75 and focusing on existing clients such as Citi, AutoZone, Dish, R.J. Reynolds and Cracker Barrel.

Torrey originally arrived at Havas in May, 2014 as managing director, following a three year stint as vice president, managing director with Wire Stone, where she led the agency’s Chicago office and worked with clients such as Motorola, Lowes, ConAgra and Carhartt. Before becoming vice president, managing director, Torrey spent six years as global business director for the digital agency. Prior to joining Wire Stone, she served as vice president, general manager and then vice president, business development, national accounts for Ambrosi, spending around five years with the agency. While there her clients included Home Depot, Expo, and Villagers Hardware.

Havas Worldwide Chicago Chicago CEO Paul Marobella told Adweek that while he’s pleased with having three women on his leadership team of six, Torrey’s promotion was strictly based on performance, stating, “For us, it’s who’s the right person for the job and hire those people.”

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He added, “Having women in the boardroom and in the executive committee has always been important to me as a leader. My personal philosophy—and this might be a sweeping generalization—is that women generally have better intuition than men. And intuitive nature and instincts to me are a critical part of what it means to have emotional intelligence in the boardroom.”

“I’ve been very fortunate through my career to be evaluated based on my performance and not really felt that [female] lens as much,” Torrey told Adweek. “I do now as I’ve gotten into more senior leadership positions and actually recognized the opportunities.”

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