Don’t miss Brandweek, Adweek’s ultimate experience for marketers, September 11-14 in Miami. Connect with peers and gain insights and inspiration from top brand marketers and industry icons at Glossier, Coca-Cola, Taco Bell and more. Register.
Stephanie Nerlich, a veteran Havas Creative leader, is assuming a new global president role at McCann Worldgroup’s McCann agency.
She’ll report to McCann Worldgroup and McCann CEO Daryl Lee and focus on new business development—especially in global markets—and on supporting McCann clients.
She’ll take on a leadership role for McCann U.S.’s Verizon account. This kind of account support can be an unusual purview for an executive, but clients can expect to see that at McCann.
This is because Lee recently developed a new leadership structure that makes more high-level resources directly available to clients. Nerlich, like other executives, will split her time between agency and account leadership. Her enthusiasm for doing this was one reason Lee found her to be the right person for the job.
“It is working with clients and helping clients get the solutions they need—but also working with McCann on the agency side—to ensure that we’re building the capabilities at scale, across all clients, that allow us to really bring brand creativity to life,” Lee told Adweek.
Creatives take on audience intelligence
The capabilities Lee referenced involve audience intelligence and data access. At the Worldgroup level, Lee is spearheading the creation of a proprietary platform, fed by Acxiom data, that parallels the ones large media agency networks now frequently use.
It is unique for a creative network to focus on this kind of proprietary data and tool development. Lee, who hails from IPG’s largest media agency UM, brought his knowledge of the audience analytics space to the creative network.
The Worldgroup network will use the tech “to receive those audience insights, and to use them for creative briefing and for creative inspiration,” Lee told Adweek.
It was important to Lee that McCann’s new global CEO come to the ad agency with an open-minded approach to creativity, and a knowledge of the impact insights can have on the creative process.
“All the richness that data provides which media agencies have access to creative agencies should have equal access to—not in order to plan media buys—which is very important and a very good use of that data, but also to inform the creative work now, in the dream world,” said Lee.