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Gravity Road Appoints BBC's Ruairi Curran as Head of Planning

27/04/2015
Advertising Agency
London, United Kingdom
195
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Ruairi joins the company following eight years at the BBC

Gravity Road has appointed BBC World Service’s Head of Marketing, Ruairi Curran as its Head of Planning.

Ruairi’s appointment marks the agency’s third senior hire in the last six months, following the recent appointments of MD Katie Lee and Creative Partner, Pete Connolly, as it focuses on bolstering its brand strategy discipline.

Ruairi’s role will be to head up the agency’s planning output across its client base, which includes Sainsbury’s, Bacardi Global, Cadbury and Bauer Media.

He joins Gravity Road following eight years at the BBC, which he joined in 2007 as Marketing Manager for BBC Two. He then moved into development, becoming Development Producer on Blue Peter in 2010, where he was responsible for generating content ideas and securing over 12 greenlight commissions every two weeks. Ruairi then became Head of Marketing for the BBC’s international news brands BBC World Service and BBC World News TV in 2011, and was responsible for developing brand strategies and overseeing the delivery of marketing campaigns in 27 languages across TV, radio and digital platforms to a global audience of over 250m.

Ruairi started his career at Lowe in 2003, two years after it won Agency of The Year. He spent four years learning the planning craft on Tesco, Stella Artois, Innocent Smoothies, John Lewis and Unilever before he made the move client-side to join the BBC.

Mark Eaves: “At Gravity Road we are not trying to recreate a traditional agency. We’re unique. Our diverse backgrounds and disciplines enable us to not only be at the forefront of creativity, but also recognise the best and most important bits of big agencies. We have no doubt that Ruairi is going to be a great addition to the senior team.”

Mark Boyd: “As the market continues to change and more brands are behaving like publishers, Ruairi’s combination of brand planning and content creation skills means he is well placed to help our clients develop world class work in this area. The fact he has developed these skills at, arguably, one of the best broadcaster brands out there, means he’s a great hire for us.”

Ruairi Curran, Head of Planning: “I am delighted to be joining Gravity Road. The agency has something special going on and I am made-up that the guys have asked me to come on board – I’m looking forward to playing as big a part as I can.”

Gravity Road seeks to create things that people want to spend time with, and works with a broad range of brands. It also owns its own YouTube channel network and has developed multi-platform entertainment shows for broadcasters including Channel 4. Gravity Road won a BAFTA and a Webby award for creating the global short-film platform, The Imagination Series, with Bombay Sapphire.

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