The corner office at TBWA\Chiat\Day New York, which has been occupied by Emily Wilcox, will soon require a new nameplate.
Ms. Wilcox is departing as chief executive of the agency, which is part of the TBWA Worldwide network owned by Omnicom Group. The circumstances of her exit were not immediately clear, nor was the question of whether a successor had been identified.
The departure comes at a moment when holding companies across Madison Avenue are engaged in what has become a semi-regular exercise: examining their organizational charts and asking hard questions about which layers of management are truly necessary. (The answers, unsurprisingly, tend to vary depending on which layer is being asked.)
TBWA\Chiat\Day, whose New York office has long operated somewhat in the shadow of its Los Angeles sibling — the one with the Frank Gehry binoculars building and the Apple relationship — has cycled through several leadership configurations over the years. The agency traces its lineage to Jay Chiat, the adman who helped invent the Super Bowl commercial as cultural event with Apple's "1984" spot, and who was known for occasionally blowing up his own organizational structures before anyone else could.
Ms. Wilcox's tenure at the agency included navigating the kinds of challenges that have become familiar to anyone running a traditional creative shop: the fragmentation of media, the rise of in-house agencies, and the persistent question of what, exactly, clients are willing to pay for.
An Omnicom spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The search for her replacement, presumably, is underway — though in an industry where the average tenure of a chief executive increasingly resembles that of a football coach at a struggling program, the next occupant may wish to keep the nameplate loosely affixed.
Original story published in adage.com: "TBWA\Chiat\Day New York CEO Emily Wilcox exits - Ad Age"