R/GA New York Boosts Strategy Department With New Hire, Promotion

By Erik Oster 

The people of R/GA New York are apparently fans of ours. Who knew??

They pitched us directly for the first time today to let us know that they’ve boosted their strategy department by hiring of Tom Morton as SVP of strategy promoting Jess Greenwood to vice president, activation strategy. Morton and Greenwood will be tasked with inspiring campaign development and defining brand strategy while reporting to R/GA global Chief Strategy Officer Barry Wacksman.

“We’re delighted that Tom and Jess are bringing their diverse experience and skills to our group,” said Wacksman. “As R/GA continues to develop new ways of working for the Connected Age, having the right strategic practitioners in place is essential.”

Advertisement

Morton joins R/GA from Co:Collective, where he was director of strategy for the past two years, leading branding and innovation projects for clients including Coca-Cola, Google, Charles Schwab and the Museum of Modern Art. Before joining Co-Collective he spent a year as head of strategy and associate partner at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, working with clients such as Comcast, Google, PledgeMusic and YouTube. That followed around a year and a half as Chief Strategy Officer with Havas North America, where he worked on the agency’s Dos Equis account. He made the jump stateside for the Havas position following eleven months as Chief Strategy Officer for Publicis U.K. 

“R/GA is such an opportunity. It has this Bauhaus culture of bringing different crafts together to create new things,” said Morton. “I hope to bring even more sharpness to how we practice planning and strategy, and to work with Jess to create more opportunities at the intersection between different types of strategy.”

Greenwood joined R/GA as director of business strategy in February of 2012, following a little over two years as director, Contagious Insider at Contagious Communications (she had previously served as deputy editor of Contagious Magazine). Following a brief stint working for Google’s creative partnerships team, she returned to R/GA in October of 2014 as vice president, content and partnerships. She has worked with clients including Verizon, Nike and Tiffany, and is also a founder member of Papel e Caneta, “a global collaboration between strategists across the world to solve some of society’s toughest problems.”

“R/GA’s output is incredibly diverse, which means our strategists have to be Swiss Army knives: useful in every room and helpful in every context,” said Greenwood. “Our newly formed activation strategy team is packed with smart, hybrid thinkers from the worlds of social media, content, comms and brand partnerships, making us perfectly positioned to create work that is connected and effective across many different channels.”

We have already prepared ourselves to be very disappointed when Chapin doesn’t tweet anything about this post.

Advertisement