Samardzija moves from Omnicom Annalect to Stagwell

By Abimbola Mohammed

Slavi Samardzija, the CEO, Omnicom’s Annalect, is set to join Stagwell in the fall as senior management team.

This news was shared by Mark Penn during Stagwell’s second-quarter earnings call recently.

Samardzija has been leading Annalect, where he’s overseen the development of Omnicom’s marketing platform, Omni, and other key assets.

Strengthening Stagwell’s leadership

Penn said: “He’ll work on our forward-looking data strategy. He joins a team of executives hired from companies including IBM, Accenture, and Uber, and we’ll have more on this news soon.” This hire is part of nearly a dozen senior positions Stagwell has filled recently to strengthen their management team as they continue to expand.

Anticipating growth in the second half

On the call Penn said the company expects “accelerated” growth in the second half of the year as it fully integrates companies acquired after an aggressive 18-month period of M&A activity (which will taper off in H2). Client activity in the second half will also drive growth, he said.

The firm’s net new business revenue over the past twelve months totaled $451 million and its new business pipeline is growing, he added.

Looking ahead to pitch season

“Pitch season is heaviest in the fall,” he noted, as clients select new vendors that they want to work with beginning at the new year.

The firm also won its first government contract after recently creating a unit to pursue business in the public sector.

Three years ago, Penn asserted, the firm didn’t have the scale to chase that business. But several years from now, Penn predicted it will a “major component of our revenue.”

Strong performance across segments

The company’s digital transformation operation is “booming,” Penn said, thanks in large part to its specialist in that field, Code And Theory.” The agency has thrived at designing AI experiences to for top tech companies.

Creative agencies performed well. 72andSunny, for example, was up 19% in Q2.

Media agency Assembly was up 7%. In the media space more broadly Penn said the firm was taking steps to improve the segment’s “tech spine” including improvements in an ID dataset. For the firm’s media performance, “tech efficiency will make the difference, not scale.”

Potential spinoff plans

The company is also eyeing a potential spinoff of its Marketing Cloud suite of products, although Penn noted that such is a move is “a ways off.” Products need further development, and the revenue base should be at least double what it currently is before a spinoff would be executed.