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Cheil Worldwide’s McKinney has hired Mike Pierantozzi to lead its creative team in New York as an executive creative director.

Pierantozzi joins the agency from Saatchi & Saatchi, where he had led the Walmart account since Publicis Groupe won that business away from The Martin Agency without a review last summer. Moving forward, he will partner with the New York office’s new CEO Joe Maglio.

Chief creative officer Jonathan Cude said the new hire has “a rare combination of skills that make him uniquely suited for McKinney in New York,” citing his experience working for “nimble, scrappy creative shops in New York” and calling him “the Rocky Balboa of advertising: humble, authentic and honest—and from Philly.”

Prior to joining the Saatchi & Saatchi organization in 2013, Pierantozzi was an ECD at Taxi New York and The Brooklyn Brothers. He’s also worked at Ogilvy and Red Tettemer of Philadelphia, and his portfolio includes campaigns for such brands as Luvs, IBM, Kraft and the New York Rangers. The Walmart campaign “The Receipt” won a Bronze lion in the Promo category at this year’s Cannes festival.

“One of the priorities since my first day at McKinney was to find the right creative partner to lead New York—someone not only with a great track record but also the intensity to dig in and grow an office, day by day,” said Maglio, adding that the new ECD “exemplifies the leadership style and work ethic that we were looking for.”

Pierantozzi said, “I couldn’t be more excited to be a part of the McKinney team.”

Earlier this year, McKinney New York moved its team of approximately 15 staffers into the headquarters of The Barbarian Group as Maglio joined from Havas in the CEO role.

McKinney’s clients currently include Cheil parent company Samsung along with Sherwin-Williams, CarMax, Norwegian Air and DuPont.

Just over a week after concluding the global review that sent most of its $2 billion-plus media planning and buying duties to Dentsu’s Vizeum, AB InBev has parted with one of the key players in that process.

Global VP of consumer connections Andy Meldrum will be leaving the company at the end of this month after 17 years in the beverage business.

“Andy … will be leaving at the end of October to pursue other personal and career opportunities,” said a spokesperson. “We wish him well in his future endeavors and thank him for his contribution to our company.”

The representative did not elaborate on the reasons for his departure or the aforementioned opportunities.

Meldrum was a member of the executive team leading the review, which officially launched in March and initially involved all of the “Big Six” holding groups including Havas. The biggest factor in Dentsu’s eventual win, one party told us, was price.

While Dentsu won the bulk of the work including agency of record duties for Europe, Africa and North America, MediaCom also retained some of its responsibilities in Central and South America, with Publicis retaining much of Asia and adding some more work in Columbia, Peru and Ecuador and Omnicom picking up Australia, India and Vietnam.

Meldrum was identified by a party involved in the review as one of the individuals present when the winners were announced earlier this month. He also recently transferred from London to New York. Before joining AB InBev last year in the global role, he spent more than four years with SABMiller, working as head of media and digital brand communications in Europe. He previously held similar positions at Australia’s Carlton & United Breweries of Foster’s fame as well as Diageo and P&G.

Today, AB InBev coincidentally celebrated its one-year anniversary as a “megabrewer” following the official announcement of the SABMiller merger.

The world’s biggest holding groups have yet to recover from the August implosion that saw WPP’s stock price drop more than 10 percent in one day.

Today, the stock prices for every major holding group with the exception of Dentsu dropped on the news that Credit Suisse had trimmed its estimates for media spends.

This was the same reason for the summer dip, which followed announcements by P&G and Unilever that they would be cutting their respective budgets for “ineffective” digital ads.

WPP, Publicis, Omnicom and IPG all saw their shares’ values dip, with the latter taking the biggest hit at around 2 percent.

From Seeking Alpha, this is happening “as the firm sees lower organic revenue growth and a risk in U.S. media buying (about 6% of IPG’s EBIT) where clients divert fees to targeted linear TV campaigns.”

In other words, the investment bank doesn’t see TV budgets recovering anytime soon, no matter how many internal debates we may have about the superiority of long-form creative.

Another key quote regarding Omnicom: “We believe OMC’s advertising business will continue to slow, despite easier comps, as client spending from key verticals including FMCG remains muted.” That means CPG clients, of course.

Interestingly, Credit Suisse did find a bright spot on the advertising horizon: Snapchat. One analyst tells Barron’s that the platform has done a better job in convincing clients and media agencies to spend money on its targeted ads, arguing that everyone is now more comfortable with the still-odd vertical format.

Oh, and Mark Zuckerberg is still the King of the World, no matter how lame his legless virtual Puerto Rican adventure turned out to be.