Senior-level changes and a global order to cut heads have fed dire speculation about JWT. But CEO Jos Ortega emphasizes, “We are restructuring, and with streamlining may come some attrition.”
Seeking a broader base beyond its global accounts, JWT will seek to grow local business, partly through specialized units. The first of these, Zzing!, was launched recently to push into advergaming. Now headed by Cez Golez (her title is Player 1), the unit has previously developed games for brands such as Ford, rogin-E and Sunsilk. Practices in design and an online media product are set to be launched within the first half of this year.
Because all three units will be part of WPP Marketing rather than JWT, they will be able to extend their expertise to other agencies, much as WPP’s Group M does for media.
“It’s the entrepreneur in me,” says Ortega, who is considered one of the country’s best strategists and joined JWT as CEO in mid-2008. “You have to develop [the agency] in a different way from what you inherited.” In a sense he is following in the steps of his predecessor Matt Seddon, whose launch of an activation unit gave the agency an early start in what later became a crowded market. (Too crowded now, it turns out: that unit will be collapsed, and its team reassigned among the forthcoming units.)
The hiring of two very senior staffers, Planning Director Pam Garcia and more recently Client Service Director Miriam Pangan, is part of the restructuring as well.
Ortega also tackled the fate of JWT’s creative culture after the departure of Global Creative Chief Craig Davis. According to Ortega, the Davis void will be filled by a more hands-on World Creative Council drawing on top talent from several regions, including multi-awarded Argentinean creative Fernando Vega Olmos. Tightening purse strings or not, Ortega says that other Davis legacies will remain very much a part of JWT culture.
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