Direct marketing agency MRM Partners Worldwide, an arm of McCann-Erickson WorldGroup, restructured its international management ranks to encourage new business for its client base.
Steven Woolford was named to the new position of worldwide managing director for interactive agency Zentropy Partners. He was executive vice president and managing director of Zentropy's Los Angeles office.
Woolford's colleague, Michael Hughes, was promoted to North American regional director after handling the Microsoft account as group account director. The position was vacant for a year and half. And Jane Tubb becomes regional director for MRM Partners Asia-Pacific, a new position.
All positions report to Pam Maphis Larrick, New York-based CEO of MRM Partners. The changes aim to directly involve senior executives with global accounts like Microsoft, Nestle, Johnson & Johnson, UPS, L'Oreal, Unilever, Coca-Cola and General Motors. These clients contribute to MRM's worldwide billings of $1.4 billion.
“Our senior people around the world have to be in the room with these clients,” Larrick said. “I think it's about focus, and when you have the right people in the right place with the right strategy, you're going to succeed. It's all designed around better client delivery.”
Woolford, for example, worked on sites like gm.buypower.com and parkplace.com. From his Los Angeles base, he will oversee six main Zentropy outposts in London, Frankfurt, New York, Minneapolis, Sydney and his home office. He also will integrate 22 offices in Asia-Pacific, Europe and Latin America.
Hughes will manage the MRM offices in North America, including Los Angeles, Kansas City, Dallas, Detroit, Toronto, Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Minneapolis and Princeton, NJ. Tubb, his colleague in Asia-Pacific, will oversee offices in Bombay, Bangalore, New Delhi, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo and Sydney.
Overall, the changes are to result in an exchange of best practices and proprietary tools in relationship marketing. MRM already has effected these changes within The Publishing Agency, its custom publishing arm, and Miller Starr, its database management and analytics unit.
In essence, the regional directors will oversee all units in their region.
“These changes are client-based,” Larrick said, “anticipating their needs to quickly transfer and implement successful relationship marketing practices from region to region around the world.
“The old agency system that's still the model for many others is inward-looking,” she said. “It was all about simply giving more turf to successful agency practitioners without demanding a larger deliverable to the client.”
