The phrase "agency of the future" has been promised so often on Madison Avenue that it has come to sound less like a destination and more like a perpetual motion machine — always arriving, never quite arrived.

Nevertheless, Assembly, the media agency owned by Stagwell, is making another attempt at the journey. The agency announced that Liz Rutgersson will become its chief executive, with responsibility for global operations and North America, effective Monday. Connie Chan was named to lead the agency's operations in the Asia-Pacific region.

Ms. Rutgersson, in an interview with Adweek, said she had spoken with several agencies before joining Assembly, but was drawn to what she described as its nimbleness combined with the scale afforded by the Stagwell umbrella. (Whether nimbleness and scale can coexist comfortably under one roof is a question that has occupied holding company executives since approximately the Carter administration.)

In her new role, Ms. Rutgersson is charged with driving growth, strengthening client partnerships, and building what the agency described as "long-lasting relationships" — a formulation that suggests the previous relationships may have been of somewhat shorter duration.

She said her early conversations with Mark Penn, the chief executive of Stagwell, had produced alignment on the goal of making Assembly "an agency for the future."

Assembly is part of Stagwell, the holding company Mr. Penn has built in recent years as an alternative to the legacy giants of the industry, positioning it as more digitally native and less encumbered by the infrastructure of an earlier era.

The appointment comes during a period of considerable executive movement across the agency world. Elsewhere in the trade press on the same day, Omnicom's John Wren was discussing the planned departure of another senior executive, described as having been in the works "for some time."

The future, it seems, will have to wait for Ms. Rutgersson to settle in.

Original story published in adweek.com: "Liz Rutgersson Named CEO of Stagwell’s Assembly to Build 'Agency for the Future’"