Hasta La Creative!

With the Hallmark holiday around the corner, MRY released a self-explanatory Mother’s Day video entitled “Moms Explain What Their Kids Do in Advertising.”

After (finally) getting the video chat to work, MRY mothers make an effort to explain what it is their children do at MRY — although one mom can’t decide if it’s MRY or MYR. Attempts at job descriptions include “Does Things on the Internet,”  “Supervisor of People” and “Online Advertising Through the Computer Director of the Department in Advertising Twitter Facebook Any-Kind-of-Internet-Kind-of-Thing.” MRY concludes that there’s no question that they love their moms (even if they don’t have a clue).

Just over a year ago, the New York-based Publicis Agency MRY (formerly Mr. Youth) announced its plans to expand with a new office in San Francisco.

The move came after a win on the SF-based StubHub account, which itself followed more dramatic changes: an LBi merger and the hiring of 360i’s David Berkowitz as CMO.

In order to flesh out its West Coast creative team, MRY then hired Brad Cohn – formerly of McCann, BBDO, Y&R, DDB, and FCB Chicago — to serve as its ECD there.

Today we learned that Cohn lasted less than two months in the role and that MRY is still seeking his replacement.

The agency did not offer comment on Cohn beyond confirming his departure, but his online portfolio tells us that he left MRY in January and soon joined Paradise Advertising of St. Petersburg, Florida as its chief creative officer. Paradise, which does not appear to have announced Cohn’s hire, does not yet feature him on its homepage either.

MRY is currently still in the process of seeking a replacement for Cohn in San Francisco.

Today MRY named Brad Cohn ECD of its West Coast office (which is about to turn eight months old). The agency also announced that it will be social/digital AOR for top banana Del Monte.

Cohn has a more extensive agency background than most. While the release tells us that he joined MRY from McCann, where he was ECD on the HP account, his resume indicates that he left twofifteenmccann in 2012 after one year with that shop and five years as VP/ECD at McCann Worldgroup San Francisco and spent the past two and a half years working freelance.

The rest of his history reads like a who’s who of Midwestern agencies: art director/copywriter at BBDO and Doner, ACD at DDB, VP/CD at Y&R, creative director on Coors for FCB Chicago.

On Del Monte, the agency will begin handling the client’s social/digital presence this month — but the first campaign complete with activations aimed at “existing canned food consumers” will arrive in early 2015.

Said campaigns will focus on the E-word, “engagement” — and MRY will be part of a team including Starcom MediaVest Group, Saatchi X, Integer, Juniper Park, and PR Hacker.

No word on which clients Cohn will handle at MRY West, though the agency writes that the Del Monte account now leads its Bay Area office’s roster.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

To update our recent post on MRY‘s status in the wake of this month’s Publicis shakeup, we can confirm that founder/CEO Matt Britton will now oversee the operations of both his own agency and fellow New York shop Big Fuel. The agency founded by Avi Savar announced in 2011 that it would sell to Publicis, where it initially served as a “social media center” for Razorfish, Digitas, Zenith and Starcom).

This week Laura Desmond, CEO of the Starcom Mediavest group that now includes both MRY and Big Fuel, announced that their leaders would report to Britton, who will subsequently report to her.

The move has not been announced outside the newly expanded Starcom because it will not reportedly affect any of the services that either agency provides to clients.

While the leaders of both shops will report to Britton moving forward, they will remain operationally independent from one another. (As a reminder, one of Big Fuel’s most recent major staffing moves was the hire of former Dachis Group ECD Jon Resnik as EVP/ECD.)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

You’ve heard of Vine, right? Of course you have–and we’ll go out on a sturdy limb in suggesting that most of our readers probably don’t think of Twitter’s six-second loop tool as the Next Big Thing in digital marketing.

This week, however, the company unveiled the latest step in its campaign to appeal to those of the agency persuasion: loop counts.

What does that alien phrase mean? Metrics to measure how many times people have clicked on given “vines” have been around for a while, but this one tells us how many times a given clip has looped–and it somehow controls for the “open tab” factor as well. The idea is that viewers will watch the most compelling Vines loop repeatedly, thereby increasing brand retention, etc.

In short, we can now get a better sense of how much Vine campaigns are worth–and, given recent agency trends focusing on more accurate measurement for social media campaigns, some think that this means more shops will have to take Vine seriously.

A few marketing experts weigh in after the jump.

(more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

MRY‘s San Francisco office has a new Managing Director.

International agency vet Kingsley Taylor will oversee all “operations, marketing, business development and account servicing” for MRY West, effective immediately. The new office, which opened several weeks ago with approximately ten staffers in a space shared with other Publicis Shops, serves key clients including Adobe, Neutrogena, StubHub and Visa.

Taylor most recently worked as Director of New Business at L.A.’s David&Goliath, but his roots lie in the United Kingdom, where he spent two years in accounts at Oglivy & Mather before transferring to the agency’s New York office; he later held the Senior Partner, Global Business Director position at Ogilvy Los Angeles.

The release notes that Taylor “also served as a client service director at Mile 9? and “held account management jobs in the U.K. at agencies like WDMP and G2?, working with clients ranging from Qualcomm to British American Tobacco and United Biscuits.

MRY founder/CEO Matt Britton writes:

“Kingsley brings a consultative approach to the business, along with energy, passion and an entrepreneurial style that will build on the great work our group has done out in San Francisco. He is a perfect fit for or culture and exactly who we need to spread the MRY love in the Bay Area.”

Taylor will report directly to Britton.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Publicis Groupe’s ROKKAN has officially launched its new media planning/buying offering, and its staff already includes three industry vets:

• Sean Miller, who is SVP of strategy, most recently worked in the strategy/planning department at R/GA New York
• Lindsay Williams, VP of media and analytics, joins the agency from Estee Lauder, where she was global brand director; prior to that role she worked with several clients at Razorfish
• Joe Meanor will serve as VP of client partnership. He joins ROKKAN from MRY, where he worked as group director

CEO/managing partner John Noe explains the offering’s purpose:

“Media is actually something we’ve been doing for several of our clients over the last couple of years, albeit in a bit of an ad-hoc fashion.”

As client requests for paid services increased, Noe and team decided to launch the new offering, which is less an independent unit than a “natural progression” of the agency’s existing services.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.