• Ad Age, Brand Republic, Wednesday, February 10, 2010 10:22 AM

CMO Simon Clift is leaving Unilever to spend more time with his family in Brazil and to "do something different (in that order)," he says in an email response to a story by Jack Neff. He once ran the company's personal-care brands in Brazil and has an adopted Brazilian son and a house in the colonial town of Parati, two hours outside Rio de Janeiro, Neff reports.

The outspoken and colorful Clift, 51, was president of marketing before gaining the CMO title and has been running the Unilever operations with a maverick's flair for nine years. Rumors were that he would not/could not get along with new CEO Paul Polman, a Procter & Gamble and Nestle veteran, but they have always supported each other publicly. Under Clift, Polman writes in an email, "we have with Axe or Dove some of the biggest innovations of the past decade, or led the move to alternative media in many areas."

Clift is credited with the success of Axe and with taking the risk of appointing the then-untested Bartle Bogle Hegarty to the account. Global PR, digital and media reviews have all been completed within the past year.

"Often lauded as the greatest INTUITIVE marketer of Unilever, he rose to the top on the remarkable realization that 'sex sells' (i.e. Axe)," writes an anonymous commenter to Age's story, who goes on to predict another agency review this year. But a comment following Brand Republic's coverage of the story wins today's prize for inscrutable wisdom and offers further proof why there will always be an England: "When the tree loses the apples, the badger lies down with the hornet's ear. But the apple always makes the tree the badger's core."

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