Deloitte Digital elevates two executives to strengthen its creative bench
Milton Correa and Jones Krahl named co-U.S. heads of creative, brand and advertising.
Troov
Deloitte Digital is expanding its leadership team by elevating two current executives into newly created positions.
Milton Correa and Jones Krahl will take on the roles of co-U.S. heads of creative, overseeing work for Deloitte Digital's brand and advertising offerings across all its offices in the U.S. region. Correa and Krahl had been executive creative directors at Deloitte based in New York.
“We’ve been here for a couple of years and are still trying to figure out exactly everything that Deloitte is capable of,” Krahl said. “So it’s almost like we haven’t even scratched the surface.”
Correa and Krahl will report directly to Leslie Sims, who joined Deloitte Digital as its first-ever chief creative officer in March of last year. Sims said the two are the “engine behind the advertising” at Deloitte and saw what they were bringing to the table. “These guys most certainly are and have been growing and flourishing within the consultancy, feeding and almost informing what kind of ways we can be solving our clients biggest problems using creativity,” she said.
Expanding creativity
In their previous roles, Correa and Krahl were “really focused on [Deloitte Digital's] New York City home-base clients," Correa said, adding that in their new positions, they’ll be able to focus on the “best-in-class creative talent from across the country, regardless of where they’re located.” The company has offices in New York, Seattle, Chicago and Denver.
“We can pass an assignment from a team in L.A. to someone that decided to live in Nebraska, to teams that are in New York, based on who's going to be best to work on this assignment,” Sims said. For example, “‘For this assignment, it would be great if we had people who love cars. For this assignment, it would be great if we had people who love fashion and shopping online. We can go to our best talent wherever they are.”
Deloitte Digital works as one integrated team, whether that's brand, advertising, technology, experience design, sales, service or engineering, Sims said. As its clients continue to tap into all of the possibilities it has to offer, the “more apparent it became that we needed to connect the creative leadership for brand and advertising across the entire U.S. region,” she said.
“We’re building this national pool of talent, but also of opportunities,” Krahl said. “So I can mix and match the best talent with the best opportunity, the people that have the strength to do that specific thing. And I think it opens up a world for us that has never happened before.”
A growing year
Deloitte Digital has seen “growth and opportunity” this past year, Sims said, though she declined to discuss clients or wins for confidentiality reasons. “We've needed to start getting our house in order, especially escalated by COVID, that people can work anywhere.”
That growth includes the elevations of Correa and Krahl, as well as the hirings of Lauren Lavalle as managing director, U.S head of client engagement; Kristin Hooper as managing director, head of polycultural research for its Ethos practice (focused on areas such as climate change and sustainability); and Joanna Ruiz as managing director of marketing and commerce. Deloitte also recently won agency of record status for LTK, a shopping app. Correa and Krahl will lead its first campaign for the brand.
Competitive pressure
Despite the growth, Deloitte Digital remains second to Accenture Interactive. This week the Ad Age Datacenter ranked Accenture the fourth largest agency company by worldwide revenue last year behind WPP, Omnicom Group and Publicis Groupe, with $12.5 billion in worldwide revenue. By contrast, Deloitte Digital ranked No. 8, with $8.9 billion in worldwide 2021 revenue.
Deloitte Digital isn’t so much focused on the competition as it is on its clients, said Mark Singer, principal of Deloitte Digital and studios lead. “We don't really look at it as a competition of who makes more money and who's got the bigger revenue," he said. "It's not just a scale game. It's also an outcomes game for us.”
