Suzanne Powers to depart McCann Worldgroup

McCann Worldgroup has announced that global chief product officer Suzanne Powers will depart at the end of 2023.

She plans to launch her own company in early Q1 2024. McCann will be her first client.

Powers joined McCann in July 2013 as global chief strategy officer. She became global president and CSO in December 2020 and assumed the role of McCann’s first-ever chief product officer in January 2023. At that time, Harjot Singh took the position of global chief strategy officer.

According to a press release, McCann will not seek a replacement for the chief product officer role because of the “deep bench of talent” Powers helped create. That includes Singh, as well as Javier Campopiano, who joined as worldwide chief creative officer in September 2023.

Powers will also step down as the chair of FutureBrand, McCann Worldgroup’s brand design and transformation consultancy.

Her decade with McCann includes work for clients such as L’Oréal, Mastercard and Microsoft. 

Her innovation work also led McCann to be distinguished as one of the Most Innovative agencies in Campaign US’ 2023 Agency Performance Review.

“I'm a globalist, so the big, chunky global challenges are where I love to spend a little more time and help our teams get set up for success,” Powers told Campaign US. “Most recently, we did some beautiful work for Bimbo, which is one of the largest bread purveyors in the world. And we threw AI right into the middle of that work and used it to optimize and create some beautiful work all over Mexico.”

Powers’ resume also includes Fearless Girl, the 2017 activation for State Street Global Advisors featuring a girl confronting the Charging Bull statue on Wall Street.

“That's something I will remain proud of,” she said. “In my role, you create the conditions for creativity to thrive and that was one powerful example of that.”

In a statement, McCann Worldgroup global CEO Daryl Lee said Powers has “shaped our thinking, our work, our reputation and our culture in ways that have permanently and magnificently transformed us.”

He also noted she “helped redefine what we make and how we make it, pushing our collective hunger for meaningful creativity and our ability to produce it in a systematic way.”  

Powers said her next venture has been in the works for years.

While the business model is still in the works, as well as the name, Powers said the new venture “is really about analyzing and identifying the right conditions for creativity to thrive in organizations big and small.”

Potential clients include startups, which are looking to “set themselves up so that creativity and innovation is well poised to take them forward,” as well as “companies that are maybe stuck a little bit when it comes to their product excellence and how to get things out the door in a differentiated way.”

Powers is the sole employee for now, but she will be “looking for a couple of key roles” in Q1.

“I like to say it's me, myself and I, and the three of us are very busy,” she added.

Powers will be looking across McCann’s global footprint to see where her services can be beneficial in her initial work for the agency.

“If you think about the conditions for creativity to thrive, there might be a market in the world where we need to help a new team do that, there might be an agency where we want to supercharge that a little bit,” she said. “So we're doing a bit of an audit and figuring that out and then we'll go from there.”