Marketing and consultancy business SapientNitro has appointed Aaron Tobin to lead client services in the Melbourne office, as the agency continues to expand its executive team in Australia.
The expansion keeps pace with the company’s new business wins and recent appointment as lead digital agency to Mondelez International and Carlton & United Breweries.
Tobin joins the Australian management team of SapientNitro, which has been growing under Australian MD and 15-year SapientNitro veteran Marcos Kurowski. His appointment follows on from the arrival of Phil Phelan as national strategy director; Phelan was previously MD of Mediacom in Melbourne.
“I am thrilled to be joining SapientNitro,” Tobin said of the move. “Never have the worlds of technology and creativity been so intrinsically vital to each other. SapientNitro’s long heritage of connected thinking that bridges marketing and technology offers brands an incredibly potent solution to transform their business.”
An avid entrepreneur with a number of successful digital start-ups under his belt, Tobin brings a deep understanding of business to both the agency and the client accounts he’ll lead including Mondelez and the Carlton & United Breweries marketing and technology business won in late 2013.
His track record in digital marketing, business leadership, business planning saw him lead digital strategy and execution for clients such as Heinz, The Good Guys and 7-Eleven. Tobin has had senior roles within advertising and technology both locally and overseas, having previously worked at both STW Group and Dentsu Aegis with a number of large multinational brands. While General Manager and MD of Rodeo\Huckleberry he transformed the full service digital agency, tripling their growth in three years. He co-founded Citizen Media Group and sports blog platform Fans Unite before joining SapientNitro.
SapientNitro Australia managing director Marcos Kurowski said: “Aaron is the latest in our growing team of multi-disciplinary thinkers. He is passionate about technology, from enterprise e-commerce platforms through to social, giving him the depth of expertise to know how to build brands in the digital age. He’s done a brilliant job stewarding the team in winning Mondelez.
“Our ambition in Australia is to be a new breed of agency. We believe building great brands today is not about making ads, but about making worlds – deeply immersive worlds connected by technology and data, that let consumers participate in the brand story at their whim.
“Creating these worlds requires a different way of thinking about technology – it is not just about robots, PR stunts and augmented-reality glasses, but also about the less sexy world of enterprise platforms: content management systems, commerce systems, personalization and targeting engines are what ultimately enable brand stories to be brought to life and monetized.
“Delivering on our ambition requires a team that can bring together very different perspectives, points of view, ways of structuring problems and ways of creating and inventing possibilities. And that is exactly what we are building in Australia and around the world, with Aaron being one more important part of completing that. Our secret sauce is having a culture that allows that chaotic, tense, messy collaboration to exist and thrive, which is incredibly difficult to create and impossible to buy.”
