Tapestry To Weave Itself Into N.Y. Fabric

With an eye toward increasing ties to sibling network MediaVest, Starcom MediaVest Group’s $600 million Tapestry unit, the nation’s largest multicultural media agency, is launching an office in New York.

MediaVest has added multicultural assignments from clients such as Coca-Cola, Masterfoods and Kraft during the past year, and saw a need to have Tapestry’s multicultural expertise “embedded” within the agency, said Monica Gadsby, CEO of Chicago-based Tapestry, which evolved from Starcom’s Hispanic media department. “Clearly, our heritage was within the Starcom side, and we needed to develop these capabilities for the MediaVest side as well,” she said.

The office, which opens this week with eight people, will initially focus on multicultural assignments for current clients, in particular Kraft Foods.