Following a year of substantial growth, which sees OMD top the recent 2019 projected global network billings ranking by independent research company, COMvergence, OMD EMEA has today announced the appointments of Oliver Stroh and Cristina Sagarduy to the newly created roles of chief development officer and chief performance officer respectively.
Stroh, an experienced strategist with a strong background in comms planning, has run key client accounts, as well as agencies, both in his native Germany and internationally. Having joined OMD in 1996, Stroh has been CEO of OMD Germany since 2014, overseeing the network’s offices, and 900 employees, in Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Berlin and Munich.
As of 1st January, Stroh will move into the regional role of EMEA chief development officer and be responsible for ensuring consistent delivery of OMD’s product and capabilities across the network’s 78 offices across Europe, Middle-East and Africa, with a specific focus on elevating and expanding multinational clients by developing growth strategies across markets. Succeeding Stroh will be Susanne Grundmann, current chief strategy officer of OMD Germany, who will take the helm as CEO in January.
Cristina Sagarduy re-joins OMD EMEA as chief performance officer, responsible for the performance offering at OMD EMEA. Sagarduy will leverage her digital expertise in the areas of search, programmatic, social and affiliates, to apply these principles across all areas of performance marketing, including offline channels, to accelerate growth across the region.
A previous employee of Omnicom Media Group, Sagarduy has spent the last four years client-side, in-housing performance marketing globally for direct-to-consumer brand The Net-A-Porter Group before most recently holding the role of VP performance marketing for MotorK, a business designed to benefit from the disruption in the automotive industry.
OMD EMEA CEO, Guy Marks, said; “Our focus at OMD is to deliver better decisions, faster, for our clients to drive business performance. These two new roles will further elevate the quality of work we deliver, and that means driving the bottom line for our client’s businesses.
I feel very privileged to be able to welcome someone as experienced as Oliver into the role of chief development officer; he has an unrivalled knowledge of our business. He is uniquely qualified to take those learnings and export that highly successful behaviour to all our markets in the region.
Cristina returns to us having spent several years client-side. She brings a different perspective to the agency, particularly regarding in-housing where she has seen the best and the worst of it up close, experience that will be vital to our clients. Her challenge is to work with our client and strategic leaders to elevate the performance mentality and behaviours, ensuring they are embedded throughout the agency.
Stroh comments, “From 2007 to 2011, I worked closely with our colleagues in the local markets as managing director of the OMD International business in London. It makes me proud to get the opportunity to use my know-how on a cross-border basis for OMD and to further develop relevant topics for the agency as well as for international clients.”
On her return agency-side, Sagarduy said: “I am very excited to come back to the OMD family. I will be working alongside our teams and clients to meaningfully connect media with business outcomes to deliver short- and long-term results for us all. I believe that the creativity, pace, capabilities and ambition of the teams across the OMD network make it the best place to build new models around the needs of clients and help them to succeed in this post-digital era”.
Stroh and Sagarduy are the most recent additions to the OMD EMEA leadership team, established following the appointment of Guy Marks to EMEA CEO in 2018. They join chief client officers, Kelly Parker and Andy Tomkins, and chief strategy officer, Mark Murray-Jones, to complete Marks’ regional leadership team.
“I am a big believer in diversity in all its forms as I believe it gets us to better decision making. I am privileged to have a fantastic blend of talent who bring the media craft skills, the client-side experience and a breadth of knowledge across industry verticals. Adding Oliver and Cristina to the team makes that mix even more potent. We started on a journey to redefine OMD almost two years ago, and we have had a lot of success. I feel very privileged to be able to make appointments of this stature as we continue on that growth trajectory and look ahead to an exciting 2020.” Marks concludes.
OMD is currently sitting top of COMvergence’s ‘Top 6 Global Media Agency Network Billings Ranking Projections 2019’ list, with projected global billings of US$19.6bn, ahead of Mindshare and Carat. OMD is currently AdWeek’s Global Media Agency of the Year and was the most medalled network at Cannes Lions 2019.
