Business Heavyweights Beef Up Affinity ID

25 October, 2013

Business Heavyweights Beef Up Affinity ID As Nz’s Largest Independent Marketing Specialist Reaches Five Year Milestone

Affinity ID, New Zealand’s largest independent marketing agency, celebrates its fifth year with two top appointments to strengthen its board and senior management team.

Nigel Tutt joins Affinity ID as Group General Manager. He was formerly General Manager Digital at Fairfax Media and brings a strong background in driving the growth and commercialisation of digital platforms. He was the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers Association’s Outstanding Young Executive of the Year in 2011.

Affinity ID founders Angela Day and Geoff Cooper say Tutt’s appointment is an important strategic building block. “We’re delighted Nigel shares our commitment to harnessing the huge growth opportunities of digital customer engagement. There’s no doubt it’s the future of marketing and we’ll continue to lead the charge.”

Ahead of his November 25 start, Tutt describes Affinity as ‘one of those rare agencies that stands alone for the calibre and depth of its work’. He added: “I’ve been admiring the progress Affinity ID has made. The opportunity to join the team, work on some of the country’s best brands and help drive the agency to the next level is a dream job I couldn’t pass by.”

In a further move, signalling its growing size and scale, the Affinity Group has also appointed business heavyweight Rodger Shepherd to its board as an independent director, adding further commercial strength and governance.

Currently driving a turnaround at the listed stainless steel manufacturer Mercer Group where he has been CEO for the past two years, Shepherd was formerly the Deputy CEO of Fairfax New Zealand and prior to that the CEO of commercial print company PMP NZ.

Shepherd joins board chairman Bill Gianotti, highly respected as one of New Zealand’s direct marketing pioneers and the founder of AIM Proximity, who has been a director of Affinity ID since 2008.

Day and Cooper, who took the highly successful agency into private ownership from the Clemenger Group five years ago, say these moves are key to the next stage of the groups’ strategic journey.

“We’re now of a size that we’re attracting an increasing number of high profile players who want to be part of our growth. This is a natural step in the maturing of the business,” they explained.

“We’ve grown in five years from a single breakaway agency with independent ambitions, to a two-agency group (Affinity ID and sister agency Unity) with offices in Auckland and Sydney. We’ve grown from our original 27 staff at the time of going independent to almost 80 digital specialists across every key discipline from data strategists, information architects, website designers and developers through to a full creative studio.

“And we’ve driven this growth while ensuring we remain the market leaders in customer engagement and digital marketing. “

ENDS

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