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24/04/2007 | Philip Holliday signs up to head OMD Fuse outfit | Caitlin Fitzsimmons, Media Week |
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LONDON - OMD Group has appointed Philip Holliday as the new head of branded content division OMD Fuse, which works across OMD UK, and Manning Gottlieb OMD. Holliday, whose appointment is effective immediately, will work for clients including Vodafone, Sony, Pepsico, COI and Virgin. OMD Group chief executive Steve Williams said that Holliday was a "great bloke", with the "energy and imagination to make a real difference at OMD". OMD Fuse, which has around eight staff, offers non-traditional media formats such as events, sponsorship, experiential marketing, advertiser-funded programming and product placement. Holliday most recently ran his own company, selling entertainment programme formats in the Chinese market. Previously, he spent eight years at A Vision, a UK brand experience agency, where he was partner. Holliday said he took the job at OMD Fuse because of the breadth of opportunity offered by working for three agencies. "The other thing that made me keen to do it was the commitment from management. OMD Fuse has been doing some great work, but they are bringing me in to add new skills and my entrepreneurial spirit," Holliday said. "They didn't want a traditional media guy - they wanted someone with a more creative and content- based background." Holliday said he would build on OMD's successes in advertiser-funded programming, which included Vodafone TBA and Vodafone Big Idea last year. He added that he also planned to do more in the experiential marketing space, but he hoped to move away from the "passive" nature of brand entertainment and get consumers involved in actually doing something. "I'm looking at bringing a lot more rigour to what Fuse does," Holliday said. "I'm really keen to move away from media agency facilitating and trading to developing and owning big ideas." Holliday said media agencies were ideally placed to drive the big ideas in advertising and he believed branded content was the "most exciting and innovative" strand of media going forward. However, he added that the ability to convert ideas to reality and to evaluate their effectiveness was even more important than generating the ideas themselves. Holliday replaces Toby Hack, who left at the end of last year. Hack is now managing director of European operations for interactive television company Ensequence International. |