DDB North America Is Rising to the Front with Cross-Agency Strength

At the top of the year, DDB shook up its leadership in North America, aiming to break down siloes across its network in the States.

The Omnicom agency network set out to promote enhanced collaboration between its USA agencies – the Miami-based multicultural marketers, alma, the recently combined boutique of adam&eveDDB in New York, and the teams in Chicago and San Francisco – while maintaining the offices’ individual expertise and momentum.

To spearhead this, DDB elevated adam&eveDDB NY's CEO, Caroline Winterton, to a new North America CEO role, now leading the region alongside North America COO, and alma CEO, Isaac Mizrahi. Like Isaac, Caroline also continues in a dual role, as she remains the CEO for DDB’s local offices across New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

Speaking to LBB’s Ben Conway about these changes and the approach for 2025, Caroline says that it’s DDB’s clients who have asked for this deeper collaboration across the network.

^​“When we are going to market, a lot of our biggest brands – Molson, Kroger, Bimbo Bakeries USA – are all asking for a more integrated model, in terms of general market understanding but also multicultural understanding. When I look at our biggest and best work, it's when we are collectively having Chicago or New York partner with alma.”

Specifically on this demand for enhanced multicultural understanding, she highlights a US Census Bureau statistic which reveals that, as of 2023, 42% of Americans identified as non-white, with 65 million people identifying as Hispanic. “It's actually where the demographics of the world are going, and it's what clients are looking for,” she says.

With alma being DDB’s big driver of multicultural marketing in North America, this new integrated approach means more regularly cross-pollinating the agency’s knowledge and skills in this area with the other offices. However, according to Caroline, this adoption of a cross-agency mindset requires a big mental shift for talent and leadership alike.

Explaining the new process, she says, “We want all of the agencies to win as standalones as well as to win as a collective, but we [now] think about what the right team is for a brief versus pigeonholing it into a specific agency. That collective team across Chicago, San Francisco, New York and alma has an amazing breadth and depth of talent, where we can go: ‘this is the right team for this ask’.”

After six months of this strategy happening somewhat organically, she shares that the team wanted to officially codify it. Although, Caroline makes clear: “This is absolutely not a merger.”

She continues, “We’re making sure that alma, adam&eve, DDB Chicago and San Francisco thrive individually, but then when there are bigger moments when we can be better together, we open it up to make sure that collectively, DDB North America is rising to the front. It's been about [identifying] everybody’s superpower and finding how we bring that core collective to the opportunity, so that clients feel that collective strength.”

Beyond the C-suite, DDB North America is empowering its talent top-to-bottom to collaborate with the wider network. Consequently, Caroline has seen creatives enjoy not being beholden to their individual agency’s clients.

“If there's a big brief, we're going to spread that throughout the entire DDB ecosystem, so teams are getting more opportunities to co-collaborate versus just sitting in their Miami or New York home. We're being very specific about giving teams the opportunity to grow and to collaborate in a cross functional way. We're not forcing anything but when big opportunities come in… we make sure we're getting the right people on the right tasks. We’re also rewarding the right people with bigger opportunities that they may not have necessarily gotten if they were just working for their office in particular.”

In DDB’s announcement of the North American leadership changes, Caroline invoked a quote from DDB co-founder William ‘Bill’ Bernbach about the link between emotion and effectiveness. Sharing her admiration for DDB’s heritage, and its combination with the start-up energy that attracted her to adam&eve, she says that, with these changes, DDB is poised to be ‘feelings first’ in 2025.

“We are all about unlocking the emotional advantage to drive business results, and that is all about tapping into people's feelings. It's about understanding the zeitgeist of the world, how consumers are feeling as a whole, and then bringing that down to the core of: how are feelings going to impact a brand to ensure that consumers will fall in love with it and be loyal?

“I truly believe Bernbach had it from the start,” she adds. “If they don’t feel it in their heart, consumers aren’t going to act. To me, that is what’s made DDB really successful throughout the years. All the brands under the DDB umbrella really believe that unlocking clients’ emotional advantage is how you drive growth. That common DNA is so important for us to keep.”

Caroline believes that DDB North America is uniquely positioned to own that philosophy, thanks to new technologies including proprietary AI tools and something called The Feelings Barometer, developed by global CSO Tomas Gonsorcik. But according to her, this ‘feelings-first’ mantra is also a mandate from the audience.

“In a world where consumers are inundated with so many messages – whether that's politics, marketing or whatever – brands are going to break through by telling emotional stories that connect to people, and ultimately make people act to purchase. The past 10 years have been pretty crazy and wild in their own unique ways but the one thing that remains true is that people want to feel something. Emotions make people alive, and that is what we try to tap into.”

This is evidenced, says Caroline, by DDB’s joyful holiday work for Disney, its Kroger work that links food with connectivity and human relations, and alma’s McDonald's campaigns. “All of it is about connecting with humans in a way that makes them feel good, to [make them] care about the brands that are talking to them.”

^{Above: McDonald’s - 'Dulce de Leche' from alma}

Looking ahead to the rest of 2025, the CEO shares that growth is increasingly harder to achieve, but says that helping clients grow is ultimately what an agency is judged on. “That's my biggest focus; doing right by our clients. And doing right by our talent,” she adds. “As we're creating this new ecosystem, a part of it is supporting our talent more than ever, because collectively we're stronger together.”

This new collaborative, collective approach also gives DDB North America a level of fluidity, allowing talent to work on different accounts and giving the leadership “a runway to protect our teams” and create this supportive environment.

“It's making sure that people feel completely motivated and excited by the agencies they work with,” she says, adding that the final piece of the puzzle is protecting the existing culture of the different agencies.

“We've got three great agencies; Chicago, alma and adam&eve. Those are three very distinct brands that collectively work really well together. So how do we make sure that people are proud of their home team, but are also proud of the bigger DDB network?” She adds, “We've already got two pretty large-scale pitches that we're going at as a collective team. That has been really successful for us, and hopefully we will continue to see that success.

“There's going to be times that people go directly to alma or adam&eve, or Chicago. But sometimes, we are going to bring the best of the network [together]; the right team to crack this brief, versus ‘the right agency’. If we can create the best team to drive the best results for our clients, that, to me, is the biggest success.”