Global account lead, Mars Petcare,ÌýBBDO EMEA and BBDO Worldwide
Vasile is a major talent at BBDO. She has been part of the region’s team for many years and leads one of the largest, most important and awarded accounts in the world – Mars Petcare.
She started her career with Graffiti BBDO in Romania, where she excelled as a talent within the network, thanks to her strong leadership skills and strategic knowledge of emerging markets across Eastern Europe. After a successful time there, Vasile transferred to Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO, where she has demonstrated her value to the network – leading a complex and challenging account that covers a range of brands in more than 70 markets.
Vasile’s outstanding results on Mars Petcare, both in regard to business and creative impact, together with strong leadership qualities, convinced the judges that she was a worthy winner. They also indicated their huge respect for the number of initiatives that she helped to deliver for Mars in 2019.
Under Vasile’s account leadership, in 2019 Pedigree was the most-awarded FMCG brand globally, according to Warc rankings. It was recognised as the third-most creative brand in the world, the sixth-most effective, and fifth in the "Best of the Best" ranking, again according to Warc. And she picked up a Cannes Grand Prix for Pedigree’s "The lion’s share" initiative, recognition of Mars’ desire to implement a purpose-based agenda.
In terms of strategy, Vasile set out to define a series of Mars global brand platforms across the world and then to empower individual agencies to deliver the most culturally relevant and progressive solutions to generate effectiveness and recognition. She also realised that great work alone wouldn’t be sufficient to drive Mars’ transformation agenda, and convinced the company to become the founding client of Flare Studios, BBDO’s crowdsourced content unit. And she worked with Mars to encourage it to be there from the launch of Molecular, the network’s digital ecommerce arm based in Poland that now works on eight Petcare brands in 10 EMEA markets.
Vasile has focused on a complete business transformation for the Mars Petcare portfolio, incorporating data and ecommerce to enable Mars to progress to selling brands as services rather than simple products. As a result, her clients gave Vasile and her team the highest marks in an independent third-party performance review conducted three times a year (The Relationship Rating).
Passionate about people values, Vasile has supported several members of her team in their progress to senior roles within BBDO and is now established as one of the network’s, and industry’s, top achievers.
Runners-up Ìý
Julien Lemoine
Global account leader, Mars Food and Wrigley, BBDO Worldwide; vice-president, CLM BBDO Paris
Lemoine’s leadership of the Mars Food and Mars Wrigley business has been nothing short of outstanding globally, and especially within BBDO EMEA. Appreciated by his colleagues, clients and his agency – CLM BBDO Paris – Lemoine is described as the epitome of the stylish Frenchman, and modest, in that he has more ambition for awards for his team, rather than himself. In 2019, he grew the business through the global win of KIND, a recent acquisition for Mars, and continued to build the account across EMEA.
Tom Shattock
Managing partner, Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO and BBDO EMEA
Shattock had an extraordinary 2019. Part of the BBDO team that won the Ford business in 2018, he started the year taking over the leadership of the business across EMEA, based at Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO. During 2019, he won the trust, respect and support of his team and, most importantly, his clients. Shattock was critical to the development of a new Ford brand platform and supported key markets across Europe as they developed local executions against that platform in markets such as France, Germany and Italy. He has grown the business significantly since his appointment, and 2020 looks as if it will turn out to be an even bigger year both for Shattock and the Ford business at BBDO.