Hill Holliday Unveils Innovative New Model for Strategy

Hill Holliday President Karen Kaplan today announced a new model for strategy at the agency, combining brand planning, media, and content into one integrated strategy group. Agency media and digital leader Baba Shetty was named Chief Strategy Officer.

"This structure formalizes what’s already been working for us,” said Kaplan. "Rather than disconnected islands of insight, we’ve hardwired together all strategic disciplines to bring clients the thinking that drives success in the modern media and business landscape.”

"Today strategy has to be about both what the brand means and how the brand connects,” said Shetty. "We’ve had great success at Hill Holliday by tapping media and content as strategic disciplines focused on consumer behavior and response, and tightly linking those disciplines to the insights that great brand planning can generate.”

Regarding the appointment of Shetty to his new role, Kaplan said: "Baba is a proven leader at Hill Holliday. For years, he’s led our transition to being a best-in-class, modern marketing agency. For the past eight months, he’s informally led strategy at the agency, and the results have been terrific. He and our new Chief Creative Officer Lance Jensen are an absolutely world-class team to lead the agency’s work going forward.”

"We’ve found that when Baba tells us that something is worth paying attention to, about a year later the rest of the world starts talking about it,” said Anne M. Finucane, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer for Bank of America. "He helps keep us ahead of the curve, and is a trusted adviser for our marketing strategy.”

For the past five years, Shetty has led media and digital at Hill Holliday, and helped develop and oversee work for clients including Bank of America, Liberty Mutual, Dunkin’ Donuts, and TJX Corporation. Before Hill Holliday, Shetty led Interactive as managing director at Fallon Worldwide, and was a research director at Forrester Research. He also spent 8 years at BMW, where he was part of the team that initiated the BMW Films project, recently named by The One Club as one of the Top Ten digital creative campaigns of the decade (2000 - 2010).

Recent Hill Holliday new business wins include Major League Baseball, CIGNA, Supercuts, and Great Wolf Resorts. The agency won a 2011 Webby for Liberty Mutual’s Responsibility Project, and the 2010 Creative Media Plan of the Year Award for Dunkin Donuts. Hill Holliday was named one of Boston’s 2011 Best Places to Work by the Boston Business Journal.

About Hill Holliday

Hill Holliday’s purpose is to create a singular, resonant idea upon which a company can build business success that endures for years, even decades. The ultimate reward for such a mission? Relationships that endure. Hill Holliday’s top five clients have been partners of the agency for an average of 16 years, five times longer than the industry standard. The agency’s resonant ideas have achieved the highest international accolades for creativity and effectiveness: Hill Holliday has the distinction of being one of the very few agencies in the world to be awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes, the Grand Clio, and the Grand Effie. Behind this grand thinking are 850 employees in Boston, New York, and Greenville who bring talent and expertise to every area of communications — strategy and planning, advertising, digital and social, media planning and buying, and branded content — on behalf of industry leaders like Verizon Wireless, Bank of America, Liberty Mutual, Dunkin’ Donuts, John Hancock, Chili’s, Major League Baseball, CIGNA, Great Wolf, and Novartis. For more on the people, work and ideas of Hill Holliday please visit www.hhcc.com.