PHD Moves Piluso Up To Lead Strategic Communications, Content Development

 

Steve-Piluso-

In a move designed to punch up the agency's strategic communications acumen, PHD has created the new role of chief strategy officer and promoted Steve Piluso, the agency's East Coast managing director, to fill it. Piluso also assumes responsibility for Drum, the shop's recently rebranded content development unit. He will continue to report to the agency's U.S. CEO, Andrew McLean.

McLean said he had been thinking about adding the new role almost since the day he arrived at the shop as U.S. CEO last December -- especially considering the agency's heritage as a communications planning specialist that dates back to the 1990s in the UK where the firm was established. "I felt that putting strategy at the very heart of everything we do and having an evangelist and champion" in a sort of strategic stewardship role, McLean said, was a must for the agency.

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"We've been doing really good work for many clients, but it wasn't consistently grounded in the kind of insightful strategic thinking that the business demands today," McLean added. "The whole fragmentation of the media landscape means that our clients want to communicate on so many different avenues and platforms, so there needs to be a really good piece of communications architecture or strategy, or whatever you want to call it -- that weaves together everything from television to social media to search to mobile and that unifies all the different bits of content that we have and that our clients are producing."

Taking management control of Drum makes sense for Piluso, given his background. Prior to joining PHD in 2009 he was managing director for Mindshare Entertainment, where he helped develop content projects for clients such as Sprint, Breyers and American Express. Earlier he worked at Messner, Vetere, Berger, McNamee, Schmetterer, as well as Euro RSCG, and Young and Rubicam/The Media Edge, where he began his career.

In addition to overseeing Drum, Piluso will work with all the account directors and clients to help shape strategic direction for their brands. For now, Piluso will not be replaced in his prior job, which was a day-to-day operations role overseeing East Coast activity. Instead, those duties will be divided among account directors and McLean, the CEO said.

Piluso sees his new role as one that will bring strategic counter weight to the effort the shop has made in recent years to bulk up on research, data and analytics. "We've done a great job of elevating our game in the areas of accountability and developing tools and best practices and ways of predicting were audiences will be and delivering messages much more efficiently," he said.

The next step, he added, is "amplifying that with strategic thinking, tactics and breakthrough ideas." Strategic capability is particularly critical for a shop like PHD with a lot of challenger brands, Piluso added -- where clients are often outspent three- or four-to-one by their next-biggest competitors on advertising.

"The accountability that we've created [via the shop's bulked-up research and analytics areas] and the leverage we bring with the Omnicom Media Group helps to fill that gap," he said. And he believes that breakthrough strategic thinking will help fill it even more.

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