iris Introduces New Global Exec Team

iris has introduced a new global exec team that will be focused on driving growth and scale across key locations in its network, and tasked with earning recognition for the agency as a leading choice for innovation and integration.

Following its best year to date, being awarded Campaign’s Integrated Agency of the Year, and IAS Hall of Fame Rebel Agency of the Year in Singapore, this global team will be mobilized to focus on building ‘centres of excellence’ in iris offices where there is opportunity for scale–including New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Seoul, Shanghai and Sydney.   

Sam Noble and Steve Bell (Founders and current CSO / Europe CEO respectively) will be taking the newly created role of Deputy CEO, reporting into Global CEO Ian Millner, and tasked with helping strategic offices develop, expand and grow existing and new clients. 

Shaun Mcilrath, following a storming year of creative success, will be taking the role of Chief Creative Officer, leading what is now one of the biggest creative teams in the UK, and developing global creative opportunities with leaders in the Americas and Asia-Pacific.  

Stewart Shanley (current Global CEO) will take on the role of Chairman, focused on iris’s strategic talent agenda, and overseeing the network’s mergers and acquisitions.  

Ian Millner, Global CEO, iris says: “16 years ago, iris was formed and grown around one founding client - there has never been one dominant ‘discipline gene’, no departmental silos and no personal ego or hierarchy.  Today, that puts us in an extremely strong position – we’re made up of diverse specialists and natural born collaborators, we’re winning awards and working with some of the most progressive clients in the business.”

“But we can’t stop there.  We need to be more audacious, and more ambitious. Modern day networks need to be mobile.  We have a highly effective senior team that inspired much of our creative and strategic success last year – and as we continue to grow it is important we are able to leverage our best and brightest whenever and wherever there is an opportunity.”

iris will also be investing heavily in Concise, its consulting, CRM, data & insight business, and extending its global Content proposition, headed up by the recently appointed Matthew Kershaw.  Working across the entire network, and all clients, these specialists bring a new layer of effectiveness, innovation and participation to creative thinking and output, already driving commercial success for clients.  

In the last 24 months iris Concise has extended into Shanghai, Sydney, Singapore, Amsterdam and New York.  In 2016 Benj Chilcott will lead the continued roll out of Concise across the network, bringing an additional layer of value and depth to clients and creating new revenue and innovation opportunities for businesses. 

Benj Chilcott, Managing Partner, iris Concise: "We help clients understand what actually drives value (whether that be best described by sales, market share, cost, profit, share price, growth rates) - and then how they are doing at actually delivering it (relative to their budgets, their opportunity, their time scales and their competition).

"If a business is capable of understanding value drivers, measuring value drivers in real time and adapting / optimising as they go, they are setting out a platform for success." 

Oliver Boughton will also become iris’s first Global Chief Operating Officer, focused on enabling the business to be more commercially consistent and confident in developing markets.