Clemenger BBDO nabs AKQA talents as it doubles down on brand experience
Clemenger BBDO is doubling down on “experience-led creativity”, bolstering its leadership team with the appointments of AKQA’s Suzanne Croxford and Nicole Armstrong, Mumbrella can reveal.
The pair have joined as chief experience officer and executive strategy director, respectively. In their new roles, they will aim to drive brand growth and customer lifetime value for clients.
Croxford also joins the executive leadership team, working closely with CEO Lee Leggett, CSO Simon Wassef, CTO Mark Gretton, and recently announced CCO Stephen de Wolf, who is returning to the agency later this year.
Both were most recently at AKQA Australia. Croxford was executive partner of retail and commerce, specialising in redefining shopping experiences in an omnichannel world. She spearheaded innovation in commerce for brands including Kmart, KFC, Bunnings, and Oroton. Prior to that, she led martech at Wunderman Thompson, working with clients including Coles, Suncorp, the University of Melbourne, and Spotlight.
Armstrong is relatively new to the Australian market, having spent less than two years with AKQA Australia as executive strategy director. Prior to that, she worked at AKQA’s London office with clients including Sephora and Selfridges. She also spent years at R/GA London, where she focused on human-centred design and brand experience strategy with clients like Ikea, Nike, Google, and LVMH.
(L-R): Suzanne Croxford, Nicole Armstrong
Their appointments come as Clemenger BBDO looks to “supercharge” brand experience across everything it does. But defining “experience” is no easy feat. Armstrong even admitted it is “still something trying to be defined, particularly in this market”.
She did, however, note that a brand is “the sum of its customer interactions” — so experience is about “looking at an ecosystem of touchpoints and bringing them together to understand that interconnected nature of how a brand shows up in people’s lives”.
While Armstrong’s title doesn’t include ‘experience’, it will be at the heart of her strategic thinking.
“Every interaction builds on a brand’s purpose of existence, and that’s what we’re coming here to do, is bring things together and fuse a brand across those multiple touchpoints,” Armstrong said.
The push for experience comes in response to client demands and the rapid rise of technology. Croxford said with so many channels now, customer expectations have shifted considerably.
Customers are now looking to have greater connections with brands, so what Clemenger BBDO will do is “not just about the big idea, but also about the journey and identifying those moments that help them make the right decisions to give the customers the experiences they want”, she explained.
Their appointments also help further contextualise the agency’s new proposition, ‘Do Big Things’, according to Croxford. She said everyone is starting to understand the importance of customer experience and what it means for a brand, but ‘doing big things’ goes beyond that.
“We’re trying to identify the initiatives within limited budgets that brands have now. So when we’re saying ‘do big things’, it doesn’t necessarily mean multi-million dollar budgets,” she said.
“What it actually means, is doing impactful work, work that is measurable, work that is going to really shift the needle on customer experience.”
Croxford and Armstrong join Clemenger BBDO a couple months post-merger.
At the start of the year, it was announced that Chep Network and Traffik were to be folded into the agency. The pair said they see this as an opportunity that goes beyond an “agency evolution”.
“It’s a very intentional coming together of the core strengths of these three agencies. We have three really strong agencies who have all been famous in the market for a core thing — world-famous creativity for Clemenger, innovation through Chep, and experience and activation through Traffik — and I think it’s very powerful,” Armstrong said.
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Lauren McNamara is the associate editor at Mumbrella, covering the agency beat. She joined in November 2022 as editorial assistant, after completing a Bachelor of Communications (Journalism) at UTS.
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