Golin Names Alex Wood as London's First Chief Creative Officer

Interpublic Group agency, Golin, has promoted Alex Wood to chief creative officer as the UK business pushes the boundaries with record-breaking creative campaigns.

The move marks the next phase in Golin London’s multi-year creative growth plan to spearhead effective, earned-led, integrated work across EMEA. In his former role as executive creative director, Alex and his team built Golin’s reputation for bold integrated ideas that lead client marketing mixes, with Golin London rising to third in PRWeek’s Most Awarded Agencies.

Recent examples of Golin’s work include Specsavers’ The Misheard Version – the brand’s most commercially effective PR and social campaign ever. As well as the stream of ASICS exercise-purpose work, including Dramatic Transformation and Training AI – the first programme to train AI to understand what healthy exercise looks like – and, most recently, Little Reminders; the world’s youngest sport influencer team.

Along with Alex’s promotion, the agency is also promoting Paul Andrews to executive creative director, design and content, overseeing the healthcare creative along with the design and content team. The newly-integrated team is 20-strong and features a wide mix of diversity and skillsets, from earned, conceptual and channel-specialist creatives, through to art directors, makers and a new creative production division to support creative growth. All adding integrated firepower to Golin creative – from the development of creative strategy through to quality craft and execution across channels.

Further key creative hires are to be announced in coming months.

“Alex has spearheaded incredible creative momentum from London and leads the way in redefining the role of PR creative. His commitment to delivering earned-led creative, integrated across channels has unlocked phenomenal commercial effectiveness for our clients and shows the power of PR when it’s at the core of the marketing mix. Under Alex’s steerage, London has become a centre of creative excellence for Golin globally and gained industry recognition for our creative ideas. In his new role we can’t wait to take this creative approach to the next level,” said Ondine Whittington, president, Golin London. 

Alex said, “We’ve been on a journey to evolve the kind of creative work expected from an earned agency - bigger ideas, stronger craft, serious commercial effectiveness. There’s always industry debate about when it will be PR’s time in the marketing mix, but the right kind of earned-led ideas are making that time now. More of that is the goal and I’m excited for what comes next.”

“As our earned creative work becomes more central to marketing, Al has an unerring ability to partner with the most ambitious clients and lead teams to create business changing ideas,” said George Bryant, global chief creative officer.

Prior to Golin, Alex led creative for PR and Social at Ogilvy, sitting on its creative integration board, preceded by creative roles at Freuds, hotshop Resonate and Porter Novelli. His awards credits include Cannes Lions, One show, PR Week, Creative Circle, SABRES, Drum, Creative Moments, PR moments, PRCA and others.