MRM names new global president

Bradley Rogers, global chief operating officer and president of MRM New York, is taking on another title as global president of MRM. Rogers will oversee MRM's offices across North America, South America, Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Europe.

The global president role had been vacant since 2018, when MRM Global Chairwoman Kate MacNevin relinquished it to become global CEO. Earlier this year, MacNevin added the title of chief operating officer of McCann Worldgroup as part of a larger reorganization within the network.

Rogers said his mandate will be to build a more “standardized” way of working with MRM's larger global clients across its 35 offices. Clients want a lot of the platforms and infrastructure to be global, “and they're looking for efficiencies as we head into a slightly more frugal time," he said.

Given the uncertain economic environment, “retention of existing customers for brands, upselling existing customers [and] cross-selling existing customers that are already in their ecosystem is priority No. 1 because it means they're not wasting money on media that's targeting those people already in their ecosystem,” Rogers said.

One area of focus will be integrating MRM’s commerce capabilities across the agency, as well as integrating resources from RafterOne, a Salesforce-based commerce solutions provider that parent Interpublic Group of Cos. acquired in October 2022.

“We've seen just tremendous success out of New York collectively in our commerce business in terms of new capabilities, whether that's commerce as a service, or marketplaces as a service, or platform development work,” MacNevin said. “We have a tremendous opportunity to take our commerce story and embed that in across all of our offices globally.”

MRM New York experienced double-digit revenue growth in 2022, according to the agency, and added new business assignments from brands in the technology, gaming, entertainment and financial sectors. Some key clients for MRM New York include The United States Postal Service, Cigna, and Reckitt.  

MacNevin said that MRM is putting an emphasis on collaborating with other agencies within the McCann network. Rogers gave a recent example of a tech client that the agency helped secure.

“We've just won quite a large assignment to re-architect and redesign their dot-com experience, and that was done in partnership between McCann, who owned the brand platform, the brand strategy and the brand creative, and MRM, who now owns all of the design, the experience, the UX, the CX, the data and the customer journeys,” he said.

MacNevin said the goal is to manage the entire commerce ecosystem for clients—from customer acquisition to maintaining customer interest though loyalty programs and more. “We have a fair number of proprietary audit products that we've developed that help us go in very quickly and meet with clients to help them understand how their commerce ecosystem is performing, and where we might be able to help them optimize those experiences for customers and for themselves,” she said.

Rogers also expects a “huge explosion” of interest in mixed reality from clients, particularly in-store. Mixed reality is an experience that has both physical and virtual components.

In July 2022, MRM brought on 11 new hires for its creative team. The global agency now has 4,000 employees.