Megan Barron Joins NVE Experience Agency As First Chief Operating Officer

NVE Experience Agency named Megan Barron chief operating officer, a new role at the experiential agency which also encompasses leading innovation.

Barron joins from Interpublic Group-owned agency Jack Morton Worldwide, where she spent 9 years, most recently as svp and GM of its West Coast operations and innovation lead for the U.S. While there, she rose from senior account manager to svp, director of client services, working on accounts including Amazon, Google, and Meta, before pivoting to business operations and innovation.

Barron was with Momentum Worldwide for six-and-a-half years before joining Jack Morton, ending her tenure there as an account director.

“I came into operations in an atypical way,” Barron told ADWEEK. “Innovation and operations go hand-in-hand. There’s a beautiful tension that happens with where we’re going and where we are.”

After leading innovation at Jack Morton, Barron wanted to see if there was an opportunity to do something different, telling ADWEEK of the move to NVE, “crossover is what spurred and sparked my eagerness for this opportunity.”

NVE founder and CEO Brett Hyman told ADWEEK that as an independent agency that has never raised outside capital, he spent the early days “scaling operations as much as we could without a COO.”

Hyman said that financial discipline and strict vendor quality controls enabled the agency to unlock more business, scale up, and increase its output.

In addition to streamlining the agency’s operations, Barron will integrate innovation and new technologies like AI into NVE’s operations while bringing innovation-led ideas to client projects.

A big focus for Barren will be to figure out how gen AI can transform live experiences. “How do we personalize these experiences, make them interactive, add digital layers?” she said. “Emerging technologies give us the opportunity to hyper-personalize at scale.”

“We have an enormous amount of data, which I think is the key to this AI conversation,” Hyman added. “What do you have to unlock the power of AI? Our data is going to supercharge what we deliver to our clients.”

The goal is to modernize brand experiences “from the most analog when they were born—field marketing, one-to-one, sampling—to the complete unknown of where it’s heading right now, with digital, interactive layers to it,” he added.

Barren joins a pivotal time for NVE, which tallied $111 million in revenue for 2024, bringing aboard more than 15 new clients including City National Bank, Coinbase, Google, LolaVie, Meta, MeUndies, Microsoft, Netflix Ads, OleHenrickson, Pinterest, Riot Games, and the Tony Awards.

Since Shelley Elkins joined the agency as its first chief creative officer in the fall of 2023, NVE has secured new business with clients such as Fenty, FX Network, NBCUniversal, Netflix, and CashApp. It was also was named experiential agency of record for Liquid I.V. and Waymo.

Barren said that NVE’s talent stood out to her, describing them as “incredible talent [with] really interesting skill sets [and] cultural connectedness.”

“The agency lives and breathes culture, is a part of it, and is building it,” she said.

Hyman added, “Cultural resonance occurs when you meet your customer in the real world. The power of where we’re headed with technology and the ability to scale that is going to supercharge where NVE is going. We didn’t need a COO: We needed a Megan. She’s the catalyst for this incredible growth.”