McCann Worldgroup brings on first chief audience architect

Nathan Brown has joined McCann Worldgroup as global chief audience architect, Campaign US has learned. He starts effective May 1.

Brown will lead a global practice of audience experts across the network with a remit to infuse audience-based thinking across all of McCann Worldgroup’s agencies.

The goal is to evolve McCann’s agencies to have an audience-first planning mindset on every client and campaign, said global CEO Daryl Lee.

“We know that deeper understanding of audiences is good for growth,” he said. “Shouldn’t that be in every agency’s portfolio and repertoire?

Brown and his team will initially focus on McCann and the group’s other creative agencies and disciplines, which currently don’t tap into McCann Worldgroup’s access to data on “real people” through parent IPG’s data platform Acxiom as much as they could, Lee said.

The transformation into audience thinking will not just require accessing that data and implementing it into creative processes, but hiring people who know how to work with audience insights to develop and tackle a creative brief.

“We will use the tools we have across IPG to be smarter about the audiences that a brand can talk to, participate with, share stories with, and at the same time, have a group of people who can discern insights from that,” he said.

This new approach will change the creative process. Instead of delivering a creative strategy brief, creative teams will also receive an audience insights brief as a complement. It will give insight not just into how the brand wants to position itself in the world, but how different audiences feel about it and what’s happening in culture.

“It’s a new era where we share brands with people. We don’t own brands,” Lee said. “How do we balance what brands want to say and what audiences want to do with a brand?”

Brown will work with McCann Worldgroup’s largest clients to align their teams on where their highest value audiences are and what they want from the brand. He is the right person for the job because he is “one of those rare people” who is familiar with audience analytics on the media side as well as strategic creative thinking, Lee said.

He will also develp audience strategies for new business pitches, where he will work closely with Michelle Tang, who has been promoted to global chief growth officer at McCann after leading the agency to recent wins such as Smirnoff, Prudential and Post Consumer Brands.

Evolving McCann Worldgroup towards an audience-first mindset will require training and hiring for new types of talent who think more fluidly about where audiences spend their time. Lee believes that while the latter can be rare to find in leadership, the up-and-coming generation of talent inherently thinks this way.

He adds that given his background in media and as CEO of UM, the most frequent question he gets from staff since joining McCann Worldgroup is how to infuse media thinking into creative processes.

“Creative teams are hungry to expand the places in which brands are telling and sharing stories,” Lee said. “They just need people who can give them the strategic rationale for it.”