WPP's Young & Rubicam is seeking a European chief following the departure of William Eccleshare, who has taken up the position of chairman at BBDO Europe.
Eccleshare's successor will face a challenging brief. Y&R has under-performed on a network level over the past year, losing internationally aligned clients including Kraft and Jaguar.
"We already have some people in mind and we will have to find a successor soon," a spokesperson for Y&R said. "William did a great job while he was here, but three years in one position is a pretty average length of tenure."
Eccleshare was offered the BBDO chairmanship following the announcement that the current European president, Jean-Michel Goudard, is to retire.
Goudard, who was the "G" in Euro RSCG, told Andrew Robertson, BBDO's worldwide chief operating officer, that 2005 would be his last year with the company.
Reporting directly to Robertson, Eccleshare will concentrate on attempting to unify BBDO's disparate agencies in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. To this end, all country heads, including the Abbott Mead Vickers Group chairman, Michael Baulk, will report to Eccleshare.
Eccleshare will also have responsibility for BBDO's aligned direct marketing operations, including Proximity in the UK.
"I see the job as a chance for me to build the network and align the interdependency between the agencies," he said. "One of BBDO's major strengths is strong local reputations, while my experience has been in building teams across different cultures, so this is a great chance for me to build a network with strong shared objectives."
During his career, Eccleshare has been the managing director of JWT in London, the chief executive of PPGH JWT in Amsterdam, the worldwide director of strategic planning for JWT and the chairman and chief operating officer of the-then Ammirati Puris Lintas. He was made redundant from APL when it was merged with the-then Lowe Howard-Spink in 1999.
He went on to join the management consultancy Mc-Kinsey & Co as the leader of European branding practice.
Eccelshare made his return to advertising in 2002, when he accepted the Y&R job.
Robertson said: "He is definitely the man for the job. He has led agencies in London and Amsterdam, led regional networks of complex multidisciplinary businesses and spent three years with McKinsey, which quite literally wrote the book on securing, developing and leveraging talent."
- Comment, page 48.
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