Slavi Samardzija, CEO of Omnicom’s Annalect will be joining Stagwell in the fall in a senior management position. 

The news was reported by Mark Penn on the Stagwell’s second quarter earnings call Thursday morning. 

Samardzija has been CEO of Omnicom’s Annalect, which has overseen the development of Omnicom marketing platform Omni and other assets. His pending departure from Omnicom (in September) was confirmed by the holding company earlier this month, around the time the company announced that it has reorganized its operating platform and key data and technology assets into a new unit that will be overseen by Duncan Painter.  

On the Stagwell call, Penn noted that Samardzija’s appointment is one of nearly a dozen recent senior hires the company has made recently to bolster its management ranks as the company expands. Precise details of Samardzija’s remit will follow but Penn noted that he will “work on our forward-looking data strategy. He joins a team of executives hired from companies including IBM, Accenture and Uber and we’ll have more on this news soon.” 

On the call Penn said the company expects “accelerated” growth in the second half of the year as it fully integrates companies acquired after an aggressive 18-month period of M&A activity (which will taper off in H2). Client activity in the second half will also drive growth, he said. 

The firm’s net new business revenue over the past twelve months totaled $451 million and its new business pipeline is growing, he added. “Pitch season is heaviest in the fall,” he noted, as clients select new vendors that they want to work with beginning at the new year.  

The firm also won its first government contract after recently creating a unit to pursue business in the public sector. Three years ago, Penn asserted, the firm didn’t have the scale to chase that business. But several years from now, Penn predicted it will a “major component of our revenue.” 

The company’s digital transformation operation is “booming,” Penn said, thanks in large part to its specialist in that field, Code And Theory.” The agency has thrived at designing AI experiences to for top tech companies. 

Creative agencies performed well. 72andSunny, for example, was up 19% in Q2. 

Media agency Assembly was up 7%. In the media space more broadly Penn said the firm was taking steps to improve the segment’s “tech spine” including improvements in an ID dataset. For the firm’s media performance, “tech efficiency will make the difference, not scale.” 

The company is also eyeing a potential spinoff of its Marketing Cloud suite of products, although Penn noted that such is a move is “a ways off.” Products need further development, and the revenue base should be at least double what it currently is before a spinoff would be executed.  

Pictured above are Penn, Frank Lanuto, executive vice president-finance and CFO Ryan Greene on Stagwell's Q2 earnings call.