DDB poaches Alex Lubar from McCann Worldgroup as global president and COO

Alex Lubar, a 10-year McCann Worldgroup executive, has joined DDB as global president and chief operating officer. 

Lubar joined McCann in 2012 and was most recently president of McCann North America. Prior to that he held regional leadership roles in Asia and the UK, including as CEO of McCann London. 

He is the latest hire under Worldwide CEO Marty O’Halloran, who joined DDB in July 2020 and has since reshaped the creative network’s global and regional leadership teams and positioning. 

His new gig at DDB marks a return to Omnicom for the executive, who started his career at RAPP Collins as an account executive. 

Lubar will play a crucial role in helping the network’s to embed creativity throughout the customer journey, partly through partnerships with other agencies within parent Omnicom’s network globally. DDB has been working with Omnicom Precision Marketing Group, Omnicom PR Group and Omnicom Media Group on clients such as Mars, McDonald’s and Volkswagen as big global marketers look for more integrated solutions.

“We’re starting to see a lot more opportunities opening up for us at a holding company level,” O’Halloran said. 

Still, as per Omnicom’s strategy, DDB will lean into the power of its brand as a creative network, pulling expertise from around the holding company in areas like data and analytics, rather than trying to replicate that in-house. 

“The reality is, we need specialists,” O’Halloran said. “I’m a huge believer in bringing the experts in to work alongside my team, which is very much focused on the role of brand from a creative point of view.” 

Lubar will help clients identify which services they need to develop a holistic relationship with their consumers and use DDB’s expertise to infuse creativity throughout the process. An example is DDB’s work with Mars Pet Care, in which the agency has helped the brand refresh its loyalty program with a creative approach throughout the pet food shopping lifecycle. 

From his global purview, Lubar will also engage in what he calls a “scanning and scaling” strategy, in which he can identify pockets of great work or expertise across the network and replicate it in other offices and regions. 

“If something worked particularly well in Seoul, there’s no reason why it can’t work in Brazil or the Western U.S.,” he said. “A lot of the time our clients might be doing great things but they need the help of a global partner to identify and help them bubble to the top.” 

The strategy is part of a broader push from DDB to collaborate across offices and regions, which Lubar will lead. An example of this working is with Chillboards, a campaign for Molson Coors in Miami that had input from teams in Sweden, the U.K. and Chicago.

“We need to start doing things differently, being more efficient but also smarter in how we operate,” O’Halloran said. 

As DDB continues to face a talent crunch impacting all agencies, it is leaning into its DNA around the power of creativity to attract and retain staff. But in addition to training and upskilling, it’s also looking for “big picture” thinkers from different backgrounds as the nature of creativity and advertising evolves, O’Halloran said. 

“We don’t want to hire just traditionally trained advertising people,” he said. “We need people with experience transforming brands, using data, e-commerce, etc. We want people that have worked in startups.”

As DDB transforms its offerings, it’s also looking toward the future of work. Rather than a mandate from the top, O’Halloran is pushing the decision to regional leaders to do what is right for their offices and cultures, with an eye toward getting people to come in two to three days per week.  

“I think you have to do it bottom up and make people want it vs. telling them to do it,” he said. 

Lubar likened the back to office debate as “putting toothpaste back in the bottle.” 

“You can’t just flip the switch and expect everyone to go back to the way it was before,” he added. “You have to take a test and learn and bottoms up approach. You see what works and you lean into it.