Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s quest to become a bigger player outside the U.S. intensified today with the hiring of Suzanne Powers as global strategy officer.
Powers (shown) joins the MDC Partners’ agency from Omnicom’s TBWA Worldwide, where she served as global strategy director on large clients like Mars, GSK and Beiersdorf. She assumed that role in 2008. TBWA has no present plan to fill her position and her workload will be taken up by local planning staffers.
Her mandate at Crispin is clear: Help grow the creative hot-shop into a true global force.
“We’ve found a restless kindred spirit in Suzanne with unmatched talent and experience in global planning and activation,” said the agency’s recently elevated CEO, Andrew Keller. “It’s time to change the current global agency model.”
In an interview last month with Adweek, Keller expanded on such ambitions: “Our goal is going to be [to] build some hubs. And they’re going to be talent driven because what we offer people is our product and we have to make great product first. That requires containing our culture and creative product in few places where talent want to be or where the talent are located.”
At TBWA, Powers drove strategy network-wide, helping the 267 offices in 77 countries work together. She served with that organization for 10 years, with her roots in planning, a discipline she once helmed for TBWA in Los Angeles.
Her work at Crispin might prove challenging, as the shop has undergone significant leadership change of late and has a tenuous global footprint.
That said, it did score a significant piece of European business just last month, adding Cadbury’s Milka brand, which should help sweeten its standing overseas. (Along with its U.S. ops in Miami and Boulder, Colo., the agency also maintains a large office in Gothenberg, Sweden.)
See also: Crispin at a Crossroads
