VMLY&R Hires a Global CSO to Bridge Brand and Customer Experience

VMLY&R needed a unicorn. CEO Jon Cook sought to find an "ultra senior, ultra global" leader who understood both brand experience and customer experience and bridge them together. Last month, Forrester pinpointed VMLY&R's strategy offerings as one reason it topped its Creative and Content Marketing Report. And now today, the agency has hired a strategy-boosting unicorn, who will serve as its first global chief strategy officer. Andrea (Ring) Grodberg enters the agency with two key priorities—one her own and the other from Cook. Grodberg wanted her next agency gig to be somewhere she could "sell more than product" and put a focus on urging clients to achieve responsible growth. Following the addition of Geometry into VMLY&R to form VMLY&R Commerce, CEO Jon Cook has been satisfied with how all of the agency's capabilities have been integrated in its offerings to clients. Cook will be tasking Grodberg with managing the area where he does still see a need for improvement: setting the agency up to go to market more consistently, with a cohesive brand and customer experience practice. "We're not perfect on every single day and every single geography ... I think that's our quest," Cook said. "Strategically, Andrea will help with that." The agency—which is headquartered in Kansas City but has locations across the globe—has made a number of recent hires, including adding new leaders to focus on talent retention, Claire Gillis as VMLY&R Health’s new CEO and Walt Geer as VMLY&R Health's first chief experience design officer. The company, like other WPP agencies, is continuing to staff up to service the Coca-Cola account the holding company won last year. Grodberg will play a key role in leading the agency's efforts. "It's a large enough and important enough relationship that it's the responsibility of everybody on our executive team to have a point of view and an impact on Coke," Cook said. Publicis Groupe Leads Forrester’s Global Marketing Services Report Just waiting to be organized Grodberg had contemplated exiting the agency world. To stay, she sought a role that would let her blend a desire to push clients at the highest levels to achieve responsible growth, with the challenge of aligning a huge batch of assets like VMLY&R has across the globe. "It's all just waiting to be organized," Grodberg said, adding, "I knew I needed to go back to a place where I can help orchestrate that. But what was so incredible in talking to Jon was, I was very open about how, at this point in my career in my late 40s, that businesses have to do more than just sell their products." Grodberg looks at the recent climate bill that Democrats passed as inspiration, noting that the approach is "carrots, not sticks." She wants to push clients in the same ways, providing them with different benefits if they achieve certain targets regarding sustainability and responsible growth. She said that brands can drive growth, but also behavior changes for consumers. By putting those two things together, brands can have a better—and provable through data—business model that helps people. The Modern Agency CEO Must Lead With Empathy Advice for strategists Grodberg also sees the role of the strategist changing at agencies, advising them to get more involved earlier in the creative process to ask the much larger business questions. She used an example of a client needing a new website to illustrate how she thinks through the challenge: Phase one is identifying it's a business problem and then deciding if the strategist can solve it or they need to bring in an expert.In this example, the solution is a loyalty program, but the strategist needs to tackle more questions: Who are the customers, what's the CX journey, what's the shape of the loyalty program?Now she must create a brief that inspires the creatives to want to work with her on it. "There's this wild thing when strategists try to brief the creatives on that middle step and it's woefully not interesting. And the creative teams are like, 'What the fuck is this? This isn't a brief, what is this?' And that's because the strategists are all proud that they figured out that it's a loyalty program, but they haven't come up with the great insight about what type of loyalty program it should be for the brand," Grodberg said. Grodberg recommends strategists "Never, ever, ever, ever, ever brief a cold room. Your creative partner should never be presented a brief—the creative partner has to have worked on the brief with you." She sees the workflow changing at agencies, with no one person working on just strategy or just creative. Strategists and creatives are a team, meaning approaching the workflow like a waterfall "is dead." And if your agency is keeping the different parts of the process siloed, then "that's not going to help you get to where you need to get in this day and age." VMLY&R and OPMG Top Forrester’s Creative and Content Marketing Report