James Greet joins full service agency Cummins & Partners to lead major media push
Chris Jeffares, Kirsty Muddle and James Greet
Former Ikon CEO James Greet is joining Cummins & Partners to lead a major media push for the full service agency.
Greet, who left Ikon last January, will take up the national role of chief media officer, based in its Sydney office.
While the independent agency, which has offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide in Australia, has won some significant clients for its creative business it has struggled to land the large accounts for the media side.
Greet made a reputation as a change specialist in agencies after arriving in Australia in 2002 and helping to turn around an ailing OMD as CEO, before moving to Mindshare in 2010 where he repeated the trick. He joined Ikon in 2013 after the sudden exit of the management team, but departed 18-months later.
More soon.
The announcement:
We are really pleased to announce that James Greet has joined Cummins&Partners national executive team as Chief Media Officer. James will be based out of Cummins&Partners recently launched Sydney office but with a national remit.
Greet is widely regarded as one of the finest media minds in the country, was most recently CEO at Ikon. Greet built a reputation for leading transformation change during his time as CEO at OMD and then Mindshare (Australia, Japan and Korea). He led both agencies to Media Agency of the Year.
Prior to arriving in Australia, James had been a founding member of PHD in London and also headed Media strategy for BBH London’s global and regional clients, which is where his passion for the close connection between creative and media began. He has also worked in China for Saatchi and Saatchi.
As James tells it …
“When I first arrived in Australia in 2002 I remember reading AdNews one day and in particular an angry reader’s letter from some creative named Sean Cummins. “Nothing worse than being given a space to fill by some Media buyer…..”, he opened.
I wrote him a letter in response… words to the effect of “Nothing worse than being given an Ad to find a home.”
“We should meet”, he replied.
13 years later Greet added “It has been a long time and the Industry still continues to splinter and fragment. Yet today, more than ever, our Industry’s common purpose should simply be about applying creativity to solve client’s business issues. However it seems to me that the Media agency side of this business is further away from this purpose than ever before”.
“The opportunity to continue to define and build what great media and creative thinking can achieve together here at Cummins&Partners was too good to miss. C&P has an amazing array of talented people with a diverse set of skills, all unified by a shared desire to continue to find a better way for our clients, without prejudice, and without any self interested status quo or agenda to preserve or protect”.
“13 years might well have been a long time to finally meet, but they do say good things come to those that wait,” he revealed.
Cummins&Partners CEO, Chris Jeffares was thrilled with the new hire. “We launched the agency just over 4 years ago with a unified creative:media agency model, and we’ve had a great ride over that time. Now with 5 offices between here and North America, we decided it was time to look to the next 5 years and what we believe the future holds for agencies, brands and our clients.”
“Anyone can see that there is a massive acceleration of the disruption in the media and marketing investment areas globally, and with James we have a proven world-class thinker and leader,” he added.
The addition of Greet rounds out a string of major hires for Cummins&Partners and finalises a senior strategic team including Adam Ferrier as Global Chief Strategy Officer and Kirsty Muddle as Chief Innovation Officer.
The new role comes after the announcement of Rebecca Bezzina joining as Managing Director of Cummins&Partners Sydney earlier this week.
That’s big.
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Another great hire well done guys !
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Greet and Ferrier. A match made in heaven!
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CMO Greet! Boom
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Fantastic hire. Congrats!
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I find genuinely interesting to observe / try to understand when and where a reputation is made and how and when it can change.
“Greet made a reputation as a change specialist in agencies after arriving in Australia in 2002 and helping to turn around an ailing OMD as CEO, before moving to Mindshare in 2010 where he repeated the trick. He joined Ikon in 2013 after the sudden exit of the management team, but departed 18-months later”
Effectively James’ stint as CEO of Ikon a historically independent agency was unsuccessful. Faced with a lack of global support in terms of processes and hovering too far above the clients it didn’t work out for him. Certain places you cannot apply a cookie cutter approach to – Ikon was one such place.
I hope that James is flexible enough to see that going in at Cummings. I wish him the best, genuinely.
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Hi Bobby T I agree. Chuck in Cummins Muddle martin Shriber and Jaffel and more and it’s quite steam.
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I’m baffled how this article fails to mention the account losses under Greet’s leadership at Ikon. So in 18 months they lost Vodafone, Coke, Diageo, Caltex, and Goodman Fielder – combined $74m in billings according to Mumbrella. Not to mention, Ikon almost lost their founding client of 15 years, the Commonwealth Bank, had Pat Crowley not returned.
“……to find a better way for clients….” Let’s hope Cummins & Partners did a few client reference checks. “Change specialist” – not a positive one in his last role. Hope he gets a few wins in this gig.
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That old saying, “You’re only as good as your last success…..” How did you fail to acknowledge that in your article? In the 18 months that James Greet was CEO at Ikon they successfully lost 5 major accounts, worth almost $75m. And they would have lost CBA if Pat Crowley didn’t come back to save it.
That’s a change specialist alright.
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What amazes me is how top heavy Cummins & P is becoming. Is this another attempt to razzle & dazzle their already failing media department? Do they even have media clients? I do wonder…
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Up until the 1980’s Media agencies were a part of Ad agencies and the $ spend on purchasing Media was through the roof, much like it is today.
I wasn’t working in Ad agencies in the 80’s but from what I’ve heard it was pretty
crazy times and boozy lunches. Much like the stereotypes depicted on MAD MEN.
Harold Mitchell was one of the first pioneers to move Media out of the Ad agencies
and essentially created his own very wealth and powerful industry.
This is a big move from C&P and I wish them all the luck in doing so.
I’d bet that other Ad agencies would be interested in the outcome
as it would be an enormous revenue stream for Ad agencies around Australia.
However they will have to take on the Media Agencies and that is going to be a
very interesting fight.
Stay tuned…
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