• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, May 14, 2021

Black Glass Consulting, the year-old Interpublic Group “agile” marketing consultancy, has appointed Jenny Rooney managing director and has tasked her with building a new strategic platform designed to help CMOs hone their skills. 

Rooney spent the last decade at Forbes most recently as editorial communities director and chair of the publication’s CMO Network. Earlier she was editor of the CMO Network.

Black Glass currently works with CMOs and their teams at the enterprise level helping, for example to develop business strategy, drive marketing ROI and other services.

Rooney will be working with CMOs at an individual level, assisting for example on matters such as personal leadership development to have a greater impact inside and outside their organizations. She’ll also work with clients on developing diverse talent, peer networking and thought leadership to name just a few of the issues she’ll be ready to tackle.

The platform she is developing will connect client CMOs with each other and provide access to professional resources and curated content related to industry intelligence, networking, next-generation talent, academics and business schools. 

It’s designed, says Rooney, “to help CMOs be even better leaders at a time of new complexity and incredible change as well as opportunity, through the lens of what’s happening now but also with a vision and understanding of what future success will require.” 

The platform will be branded and is scheduled to launch later in the year.

The firm has also enlisted nearly a dozen well-known CMOs to advise on the development of the platform. They include: Mayur Gupta, Gannett; Karen Walker, Intel; Tariq Hassan, Petco; Andrea Brimmer, Ally; Everette Taylor, Artsy; Orlando Baeza, Kajabi; Diego Scotti, Verizon; TJ Abrams, Exos; Heidi Browning Pearson, NHL; Minjae Ormes, Visible; Fabio Tambosi, Saucony. More will be added later.

Rooney is the second recent high-level appointment at the firm. In April Jason Moyer joined as partner to lead the firm’s marketing strategy and organization design teams.