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Grey adds to its Midwest investment with opening of Cincinnati office

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By Bennett Bennett, Staff writer

April 11, 2018 | 4 min read

WPP’s Grey Group has opened its newest full-service office, Grey Midwest in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Cincinnati Bridge

Cincinnati will get an expanded WPP presence with the announcement of Grey Midwest / Tanner Daniels via Unsplash

Considered a “marketing hub” in a press release by the agency, the office complex has included Grey, a newly-formed shopper and e-commerce group Grey Commerce, a Cincinnati office for digital agency Possible, and Townhouse, a new 3,500 square-foot content creation studio.

Tony Desjardins, the managing director for Possible has now seen his role expand to manage the entire Grey Cincinnati family of 80 employees.

Desjardin’s senior management team has also been announced, and it includes: Adam Kahn, executive creative director; Brian LeCount, executive vice president, strategy and insights; Christopher Reintz, executive vice president of client services; Steve Noble, vice president of marketing science and customer experience; Todd Barker, senior director of technology; Jamie Grady, senior vice president of finance and operations; Priscilla Fernandez, group director of project management; and Rachel Durden, the hub’s talent specialist.

Desjardins said in the statement: "The establishment of Grey Midwest is a vote of confidence in Cincinnati as a creative destination and in its business community. We've created a premier one-to-one communications offering both mid-size and large-size local companies are looking for."

Debby Reiner, chief executive of Grey in New York added: "We're excited to bring the global creativity and resources of Grey and Townhouse into closer proximity and partnership with all our clients, including Procter & Gamble, our largest client. We are confident a high-performance, smartly integrated, hungry team of makers all within arm's reach will ignite creativity, collaboration and speed to market and be attractive to clients all across the Midwest."

Worldwide chief executive Michael Houston first announced this news, and said: "As we conclude our 100th anniversary, the opening of this new office underscores Grey's vitality and dynamism. We've broadened our definition of creativity and forged a unique end-to-end marketing model. This fully-integrated structure will deliver ideas that break new ground in brand experience with the agility and speed our 'always on' world demands."

Houston continued: “Grey Midwest will become our North American center of excellence for performance marketing as well as a primary service hub for clients who want to work with a lean, nimble agency that has digital, data and ecommerce at its core.”

Since getting promoted to worldwide chief executive eight months ago, Houston has been pushing the WPP-owned agency group towards the future, first by hiring its first global chief innovation officer in Michael Bennett. Proctor and Gamble, which Reiner noted as one of Grey's largest clients, announced earlier this week that it is bringing talent from WPP, Omnicom, and Publicis shops to create its own agency-like model — which experts believe was more due to the immense size of the multinational brand than where the industry's future is heading.

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