Mark Coad’s best of 2019: A new gig and a resolved insurance claim, all in one week
To end 2019 on a positive note, Mumbrella’s Brittney Rigby asks a number of media agency chief executives to share their best part of the year, both professionally and personally. Here, Mark Coad, former CEO of PHD and incoming CEO of IPG Mediabrands, shares his highlights.
‘What’s been your best professional moment of the year?’ is a “pretty easy” question for Mark Coad to answer. I suspected it would be. Just a few weeks ago, he stepped down as CEO of PHD after seven years to become CEO of IPG Mediabrands. It’s a career highlight, but it felt like a lowlight in some ways too. While he wasn’t worried about resigning to his bosses, he was worried about resigning to his team.
“I said this to IPG, I mean, if they had have approached me and I had have been out of a job, I would have knocked them over in the rush, it’s an absolute no brainer,” Coad tells me.
“The hardest part of the decision was deciding to leave what we’d put together and the people. I didn’t have any trouble resigning to the people I work for, they were fairly straightforward conversations. I really struggled to resign to the staff. That was the hardest part.”
I want to work for Mark Coad – what a champ!
One of the nicest blokes you’ll ever meet. Pretty rare in our industry. Good luck to him.