Digitas Appoints Sarah Heitkamp as National Head of Strategy and Customer Experience

Publicis’ Digitas has boosted its Australian leadership team with the addition of Sarah Heitkamp as national head of strategy and customer experience.

Sarah was an internal Publicis hire; she previously spent 13 years at Zenith, most recently as national head of strategy and planning. During her time at the business, she worked across markets like Beijing, London, and Germany, and was drawn to the Digitas role because of the business’ ability to “connect data, technology and creative thinking in a way that’s both agile and deeply integrated.”

She’ll lead a national team, and be tasked with pushing the strategic thinking further by connecting media, CRM, and customer experience.

“In today’s landscape, clients are looking for more than clever campaigns. They need strategic partners who can translate intelligence into impact,” she said.

“With my roots in media strategy, I understand the power of paid channels to drive scale, but it’s the integration with CRM and owned experiences that unlocks sustained growth.”

She builds out a leadership team steadily strengthened by CEO Davy Rennie since he began in the role just over a year ago. He has structured the business into five service lines – creative, intelligence, commerce, technology, and integrated media – and in the past few months, streamlined Simon Brock’s executive creative director role, hired Millie Menage as chief client partner, and promoted Elise Morris to head of intelligence.

“Building a high-performance business meant building high-performance practices and service lines,” Davy said.

“This next generation of Digitas will be led by the unicorns like our new leaders, laser-focused on what we are making and how we can best support our partners.”

Elise was previously audience and data strategy director, joining Digitas in 2021 after a stretch at Publicis Media. She said the new role “is an opportunity to champion intelligence as the connective tissue between data, strategy and creativity.”

“Data isn’t just about what we know—it becomes powerful when it informs what we do and how we express it,” she continued.

“My focus is on making intelligence actionable: using data to shape smarter strategies and inspire more resonant, creative work that moves people and businesses forward.”

Millie joined late last year after seven years at R/GA, where she held roles such as executive director APAC on Google. It’s a return to Publicis for her; she worked at the holdco in London before transferring to the Sydney team in 2014. Digitas wants to become the country’s best CX, CRM, and commerce agency, she said, which involves “redefining the role of client service.” That will see her focus on “elevating it as the driving force of client centricity.”

“I was amazed by the talent and passion of the team that drove the winning strategy for the Macca’s CRM pitch, which I jumped into on day one, a phenomenal reappointment for the Groupe.”

Digitas retained the McDonald’s CRM account in October, beating out the likes of Accenture Song. The brand’s agency village also includes Wieden+Kennedy, which launched its first work yesterday after LBB revealed it had entered the Australian market to service the account, Akcelo, DDB and OMD.

ECD Simon added of Digitas’ momentum, “Our industry is full of questions at the moment. Questions about AI and loyalty and identity and commerce and CX and countless other topics. Davy’s assembled the team we need to answer those questions with Creative Intelligence, fuelled by the kind of infectious energy it takes to turn ideas into realities.

“Creativity is my obsession. Solving puzzles, telling stories, crafting experiences and designing systems is what I love doing. Getting to focus on those things alongside such high calibre colleagues, on behalf of brilliant brands, is a total privilege.”

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Top image (L-R): Simon, Davy, Millie, Sarah