Andrew Keller is becoming a member of WPP’s “Coca-Cola focussed” company OpenX as its first international CCO, reporting to WPP CCO Rob Reilly. Keller is a former CCO of CP+B within the US after which VP of artistic and experiential at Meta (Fb to you and me.)
In the meantime Publicis Groupe’s UK nation supervisor Annette King is off to Accenture Tune as international communications lead, a really consultancy-style title that will imply loads or not very a lot. Whether or not it’s the previous most likely is determined by how she will get on with CEO David Droga. Accenture Tune, it’s truthful to say, has thus far didn’t fly though it’s early days.
May these two occasions, as they used to say in Non-public Eye, be associated?
Sure, within the sense that company holding teams are all the time making an attempt new constructions and codecs though they normally find yourself going again to doing the identical factor – though it may be referred to as one thing else.
Over time WPP has tried quite a lot of single-client companies, notably, again in Sir Martin Sorrell’s center interval, Enfatico for Dell. This was a humiliation all spherical. It had Pink Cell, a community designed to service Fiat, and that didn’t final both. When the consumer personnel modifications it doesn’t appear such a terrific concept.
Now it has The Pharm for Boots within the UK (a pun it might need resisted) and OpenX for Coke globally, on the face of it a extremely massive deal. Does Keller’s appointment sign a strengthening of an already robust provide or an try and treatment artistic weak spot? We’ll little doubt see.
As to the ever-restless Publicis Groupe, King’s departure could also be the results of the set up of long-serving exec Loris Nold above her as EMEA CEO. Nold, a former banker, is a excessive flyer, perhaps even a attainable alternative for CEO Arthur Sadoun ought to he ever step down. Possibly he wanted an excellent greater job.
However that is additionally a reversal to a standard company construction. WPP has a rustic supervisor too in former MediaCom boss Karen Blackett, though that appears primarily a delicate energy/PR function (vital regardless in an organization WPP’s dimension.)
At Publicis, floating above all this, is its ‘Energy of One’ mantra, which appears to be imply promoting knowledge, artistic, media and expertise to any consumer who will purchase it. International shoppers, as WPP’s earlier expertise with single-client companies perhaps signifies, will not be all the time eager – in the long run anyway.
It’s not helped by the truth that many present big-spending shoppers are nationwide relatively than multinational. Within the UK banks, retailers, lottery operators, telecoms and value comparability websites are principally single country-focussed, of their advertising anyway.
So the holding corporations find yourself with one construction for his or her prized handful of actually international shoppers and one other for his or her massive native companies. Which is the best way it’s all the time been.
