PHD has appointed Rohan Tambyrajah to the newly created role of global chief experience officer as it looks to further connect its media capabilities with other disciplines to “unlock brand growth” across the “customer journey”.
Tambyrajah has been at PHD for more than a decade, having joined the Omnicom Media Group agency in 2013 as innovation director, before his promotion to chief strategy officer of PHD EMEA in 2019. He will retain his CSO duties for key global clients.
Reporting to Guy Marks, PHD’s global chief executive, Tambyrajah will take charge of ensuring PHD’s structure and processes efficiently integrate media with “adjacent disciplines”, such as content, influencer and commerce. This, PHD hopes, will facilitate more connected, seamless customer experiences. OMG said its “Agency as a Platform” approach, which Tambyrajah has helped develop, would enable it to do this “without friction”.
Marks said: “Driving transformative growth begins with delivering connected consumer experiences across all touchpoints, taking the customer on a seamless journey from awareness to action.
“Enabling these experiences demands a holistic, multi-discipline approach to media investment – one that integrates strategy, creativity and commerce to more efficiently and effectively inform, inspire and activate decisioning.
“We created the role of chief experience officer to better partner with our clients around the world to consistently deliver these experiences for their customers. With his track record of building and scaling connected consumer experiences that have unlocked growth for leading global brands, Rohan was the ideal choice as PHD’s first CXO.”
As chief strategy officer, Tambyrajah has been instrumental in the roll-out of the aforementioned “Agency as a Platform”, which enables the agency to pool resources, tools and talent from across the OMG and broader Omnicom agency networks.
He has also led PHD’s thought leadership, co-authoring two publications, Sentience and Merge, as well as being part of the team that launched PHD’s generative magazine Ascension.
Tambyrajah said: “Media, audience and cultural fragmentation continues to be a challenge for brands and marketers. Agencies have mirrored this fragmentation by breaking down strategy into siloes. This role will focus on de-siloing strategy and better connecting media, content, creative and commerce together across end-to-end consumer journeys.”
His appointment comes on the back of September’s recruitment of Vincent Rebeix as global chief operating officer.
