JWT Melbourne announces two senior appointments after making six staff redundant

JWT Melbourne has made two senior appointments after making six people redundant late last week.

The WPP-owned agency has appointed Catherine Graham as its director of customer experience and joins the agency from TBWA\Worldwide, where she was its director of customer engagement.

JWT Melbourne’s new hires Catherine Graham and Brie Stewart

Graham has also held positions as Clemenger BBDO’s head of customer experience and as head of direct strategy at Ogilvy.

“Bucking the trend of isolating such specialists ‘in the corner’, what attracted me to JWT is a model that will see my role positioned at the agency’s heart, helping to embed a customer experience philosophy across every single client and democratising data within the organisation at large,” Graham said in a statement.

Brie Stewart has also joined the agency as creative director of content.

Stewart was formerly the head of channel transformation at Clemenger BBDO Melbourne. Prior to her two year stint at Clemenger, Stewart was the national head of social at Ogilvy Australia.

“Too often, there’s a degree of separation for roles such as mine from creative development process, whereas at JWT I’ll be engaged throughout the strategy and ideation phases. The logical benefit of such a structure is the role of social and content is considered from the very start, ensuring every idea has a true social ‘heartbeat’, which is what modern, relevant brands require,” Stewart added.

The two new appointments come just one week after JWT Melbourne made six people redundant to better reflect “client needs”.

The redundancies saw staff losses across creative, production and account services.

Speaking of the new appointments, Michael Godwin, managing director at JWT Melbourne, said in a statement: “Ongoing strategy of investing in new capabilities that complement our core offer.

“This approach has helped transform our business to be one of the more diversified in this market, providing clients a range of best in class specialist skill-sets across multiple disciplines, all woven seamlessly through the agency – one business, one brand, one bottom line, and one integrated team.

“Catherine and Brie’s appointments are an exciting next step in this journey that will provide clients access to a level of experience in CX/CRM and content marketing/social that few in the country can rival.”