UM reorganizes US leadership structure with new roles

UM has appointed new U.S. leaders under CEO W. Joe DeMiero, who took over U.S. operations of the IPG Mediabrands agency at the start of 2022.

The appointments include recently hired executives Grant Ogburn as chief growth officer; Myia Thompkins as chief strategy officer; Preston Larson as chief planning officer and Brendon Volpe as chief intelligence officer. Current UM executives elevated to new roles include Erin Quintana, to chief client officer, and Jennifer Wadeyka, to chief operating officer. 

All of those leaders report directly to DeMiero, who said that when he got the job, Global CEO of UM Worldwide Eileen Kiernan gave him a remit to “double down on what’s working, but look at the model differently."

The reorganization is meant to “bust silos” that divide practices in favor of a flatter, less geographically focused leadership structure to help with company culture and—in the long run—client retention, DeMiero said.

“We’re always looking for ways to take advantage of our capabilities in more seamless ways, so that your team can be more successful on behalf of your clients,” DeMiero said. “The intention of this is to create a flatter organization where teams are more empowered, more on the front lines of what they’re doing with the right tools to get done what they need to get done with the leaders who can create the environment where they can be at their best.” 

Creating the chief planning officer, chief intelligence officer and chief client officer roles is meant to consolidate the agency’s work under one leader and make collaboration easier across the agency.

In the past, said DeMiero, UM might have had “a West Coast, Central, or an East Coast based team,” operating pretty much independently. “What we actually saw through the pandemic was that clients were less oriented around geography, quite honestly, and more about ‘How do I tap into the best in class talent from around the country?’” he said.

Under the new structure, regardless of where one works, ”you're connected to a national practice” that “allows you to grow in your career by connecting with strategists from across the agency,” he said.

In his new role, Volpe plans to use data and intelligence as the backbone for every team at UM. To Volpe, that means amping up sustainability, equity and data to improve UM’s practices.

“We have all these amazing superpowers that should inform almost everything that we do every day and should be the baseline for every practitioner to use,” he said. “Part of my challenge is to figure out how to enable and embed that information equally, consistently across 50 clients and hundreds of people.” 

Thompkins, the new chief strategy officer, said she wants to enable UM strategists to be more inspirational to the planning teams to better connect with audiences for clients. “I’ve really put an emphasis on having the strategy team fuel inspiration, innovation and creativity,” she said.

Ogburn joins UM from Publicis, where he was chief marketing officer of the agency’s creative production division PXP and then president of Publicis Experiential. 

Thompkins previously led the strategy team at Hero Collective and held executive roles at Publicis’ Hawkeye. Former Chief Strategy Officer Christine Villanueva is moving to a newly created role in UM to launch an upcoming offering the company declined to disclose.

Larson is another Publicis alum, having most recently been Hawkeye’s chief strategy officer. He was also head of strategy for Conde Nast’s CNX. 

Quintana has spent the last 15 years at UM, most recently as executive VP, global client lead and managing partner. Wadeyka joined UM in 2016 and was most recently executive VP, head of global operations for Universal McCann.