Driscoll squeezed out by OA&R’s ’evolution’

Fiona Driscoll, UK chief executive of Ogilvy Adams and Rinehart for

the past two years, has been made redundant as the agency switches to a

new ’practice management’ structure.

Driscoll’s job has been eliminated along with that of Brussels MD

Matthew Anderson. The new structure will have one managing director for

Europe, probably based in London.

Marilou von Festel, executive vice president of OA&R, has been sent to

London to oversee European operations on a temporary basis. Her first

job will be to consolidate the agency’s three offices in London,

Brussels and Paris into a ’cohesive, practice-based operation with

shared resouces among geographic locations’. Her second will be to

recruit her own replacement.

Anderson is moving to another job within the WPP group. Driscoll has not

been offered another job although John Margaritis, chief executive of

OA&R said he had recommended her to another WPP company.

He said the attempt to turn the now 20-strong London agency into a

powerful local player in corporate PR ’hasn’t happened at the level I

hoped it would’. What had evolved, he said, was an agency with several

strong specialisms servicing an international client base.

OA&R has been moving towards practice management in the US for two

years, phasing out general management positions in two of the offices

but retaining them in Washington and New York.

Margaritis described OA&R’s approach as a ’combination of practice and

geography’ rather than the purely practice-based approach of

Burson-Marsteller.

’It’s evolution, not revolution,’ he said.

There are no plans to eliminate country managers in OA&R’s operations in

the Asia Pacific region.

Leader, p11.