• by David Kaplan , May 16, 2005

As had been expected for at least the past two months, 30-year ad veteran Rick Sirvaitis has been ousted as president and chief executive at GM Mediaworks, closing the first chapter on the Interpublic Group unit that was created to serve its former media buying client General Motors, sources said Friday.

On Wednesday, the two-month review of GM's $3.2 billion media buying account ended with Publicis Groupe's Starcom MediaVest Group adding the business to its GM Planworks, which has handled planning for the automaker for the last five years.

Talk of Sirvaitis' days being numbered whether Mediaworks won or not had been bruited about since it was disclosed that he did not attend meetings with GM executives during the recent review process.

IPG executives were unavailable for comment, as was Sirvaitis, who was brought in to run the GM dedicated unit in January 2001. He took on the newly created position when Marc Goldstein left to join WPP Group's MindShare.

Before heading Mediaworks, Sirvaitis was president of Phase2Media, an Internet advertising sales and marketing organization run at that time by Richy Glassberg, who was hired at Turner Broadcasting System in the 1980s by Sirvaitis, and is now senior vice president and director of sales, TV Guide Television. Sirvaitis accepted that post after leaving Fox Family in 2000.

Back in March of this year, Sirvaitis was named to the board of advisors to INVIDI Technologies Corp., a targeted-marketing systems company.