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OMD has appointed Blake Cuthbert, a senior management consultancy partner at Bain & Company, as its new EMEA chief executive.

Cuthbert rejoins the media agency in May after three years at Bain, where he was an expert partner and helped launch the EMEA hub of its media, creative, data and technology arm, FRWD.

He succeeds Guy Marks, who was promoted to CEO of Omnicom Media Group EMEA last month.

Cuthbert was previously OMD EMEA’s chief digital officer and spent nearly 10 years working at OMD and its sister creative agency, DDB. He has also occupied senior roles at Dentsu’s Isobar.

His departure from Bain bucks the usual trend of consulting businesses poaching talent from adland to build their marketing consulting divisions.

He was responsible for developing Bain's marketing and ecommerce capability and advising clients on marketing transformation strategies.

Marks said his successor's experience of marketing transformation is a useful asset to media agencies as they too shift towards meeting changing client demands and the rapid digitalisation of the marketing industry.

“Blake’s Bain experience has given him in-the-room visibility and insight to the challenges that global brands face, and the solutions they require to achieve both results and business transformation,” Marks said. 

“This experience, combined with his agency knowledge, makes him uniquely qualified to develop and scale these solutions to drive business outcomes for our clients in a dramatically evolving marketplace.” 

OMD Worldwide chief executive George Manas described Cuthbert as “the right leader at the right time”.

He added: “At a time when marketing transformation is a top priority for businesses, Blake’s experience will be an invaluable asset in growing this increasingly important service area and elevating the agency/client relationship from transactional to transformational.”

Cuthbert, who will be based in London, will join OMD EMEA at a time it is in rude health, tripling its year-on-year new business billings in 2021 and earning the top spot on the RECMA Diagnostics Report. 

In the UK, OMD (under Laura Fenton) and its sister agency MG OMD (under Natalie Bell) have had a strong year. It cleaned up at the Media Week Awards, has added new clients including British Airways, Comparethemarket and Pernod Ricard, while OmniGov (led by Paul Knight) retained the government’s media buying contract.

“I’ve watched how OMD has continued to grow and transform in the years since I’ve left and I couldn’t have picked a more exciting time to return,” Cuthbert said.

“The one core thing that I have learnt when working with Bain’s clients is the importance of adopting new ways of working in cross functional teams to deliver bold marketing ambitions. As CEO, my priority is to combine OMD’s deep expert talent, the Omni platform, and our clients' ever evolving capabilities to drive maximum business impact.”