Morning Update: Strategist cons agency over $260m; how to win over millennials at branded events; why marketers need message apps

Back in 2012, Bill Grizack was working as a top strategist at Winston-Salem’s Pave (aka The Variable). But he badly wanted to be a partner–and in order to get that bump, he needed to invest six figures in the agency or bring in half a million dollars’ worth of new business. Instead, he chose to fake it.

Grizack somehow convinced executives that he had won the business of Coca-Cola, Brown-Forman and other clients to the tune of more than $269 million via fake emails, faked phone calls, and contracts that he drew up himself.

Campaign Live: Five tips to help women become catalysts for change

Today is International Women’s Day, and Geometry Global’s UK chief executive Sarah Todd shares advice for women to embrace possibility and their inherent strengths.

I grew up on a Yorkshire farm as the eldest of two daughters. Helping out with the basic farm duties was a way of life for both of us: from fencing to lambing, from potato picking to taking cattle to market. Every day my dad was up and out the door, rain or shine, and tasks were assigned with no thought to age, size or experience, and certainly not to gender.

Often the speed and effectiveness of our actions meant the difference between life or death, profit or loss; such is the way of the farming world.  I have always been fuelled by a belief that we can do anything if we put our heads down, demand help when we need it, and then go for it.

Ad Age: Leo Burnett London Taps Sobhani as CCO, Palmer Leaves Barbarian Group and More

Leo Burnett London has appointed Chaka Sobhani to the role of chief creative officer. She joins Leo Burnett London from Mother London, where she has worked since 2013. Prior to that she worked at broadcaster ITV, setting up in-house agency ITV Creative and becoming its first creative director.

Barbarian Group co-founder Benjamin Palmer has left the agency after 14 years. Palmer, who announced the news on social media saying it was “time for a new adventure,” was one of six partners who co-founded the agency in 2001.

Mumbrella Asia: Former Edelman APAC boss Alan VanderMolen joins WE to lead international operations

In an interesting move in the PR world, Alan VanderMolen, a long-time Edelman executive who ran the agency’s APAC operations for many years before moving to a global role in the US, has joined rival WE to lead the company’s international expansion.

VanderMolen left Edelman, where he ran APAC for nine years from 2002, soon after a story broke in the Holmes Report last year linking the executive with a probe in China that led to the detention of former country boss Steven Cao.