Nigel Marsh joins The Leading Edge as Bateman exits

EXCLUSIVE: Enero-owned The Leading Edge (TLE) has announced the appointment of adland royalty turned author and speaker Nigel Marsh as its new chairman following the resignation of global CEO Andy Bateman.

Bateman, who takes up a new post at Telstra, was in the role for three years, moving to Australia from New York to take up the post. TLE will be led by Lee Naylor (MD, Australia), Chrissy Blackburn (global head of strategy) and Chris Paxton (MD, UK). In a great coup for TLE, Nigel Marsh will join the leadership team as chairman of TLE later this month.

With a career spanning over 25 years in branding, marketing and business Marsh’s previous roles include, CEO of Leo Burnett and Regional Group CEO of Y&R Brands Australia and NZ.

In his career Marsh has worked across a diverse range of clients from high profile brands such as McDonalds, Canon, Pepsi, P&G, Virgin, Mars, Fiat and Colgate, to national governments and local enterprises.

Marsh is also an author of three books – Fat, Forty and Fired, Overworked and Underlaid and Fit, Fifty and Fired-Up and earlier this year launched the Sydney Skinny Charity Swim.

He told B&T he was delighted to be given the opportunity “to work with like-minded people on things that interest me”.

He added that he and the management team of TLE “were getting on like a house on fire”.

The co-founder of Earth Hour, has also recently sold the rights to Warner for making a pilot program for a show based on his first book, which was the top selling Australian book in 2006. He also started a nude chairty swim in Sydney this year called the Sydney Skinny.

“Since the publication of my third book and the launch of Sydney Skinny I have been getting increasingly involved back in the corporate world with a number of consulting and coaching roles.”

Marsh added that his role as chairman of TLE would afford him the opportunity to continue many of his other business opportunities, which this year has included working on a major integrated campaign for the Australian Indigenous Education Foundation, which featured the highly publicised portraits of Aboriginal Australians as Prime Minister under the tagline: This will never happen, we say it can.

As a concluding joke Marsh told B&T that his wife had threatened him if he didn't return to full time work his next book would be called Sad, single and sixty.

On Bateman’s departure, Matthew Melhuish, CEO of Enero Group, which owns TLE, commented in statement: “Andy leaves TLE with our very best wishes. His energy, enthusiasm and larger-than-life personality will be missed by clients and staff alike and we thank him for his hard work and dedication to TLE over the past three years.”

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