Advertising & Marketing

WFA launches three groups to address key marketer priorities

Best In Class

“In bringing our best-in-class peer-to-peer learning environments to these increasingly critical areas, we hope to equip our members with the knowledge they need to tackle their individual challenges” – Stephan Loerke, CEO of WFA

The WFA has created three new forums where global and regional marketers can share knowledge and experience around the areas of increasing concern for WFA members, including marketing capabilities, agency management and in-housing. 

As Stephan Loerke, CEO of WFA, explains, “We’re delighted that three such senior marketers have stepped up to expand our range of specialist groups addressing major challenges that many regional and global companies can struggle with. In bringing our best-in-class peer-to-peer learning environments to these increasingly critical areas, we hope to equip our members with the knowledge they need to tackle their individual challenges”. 

The group brings together not only the global WFA community, but also their respective thought leadership and best practices. Value will be delivered through research and reports, peer-to-peer meetings and online tools and benchmarking services, aiming to provide clarity and guidance in an ever increasingly complex environment.

Each forum will be headed by a senior global marketer:

• The Agency Management Forum will be headed up by Tammy Hourigan, Global Agency Relations Director at Unilever, and “will be focused on sharing knowledge around the transformation of agency roster models, pitching and integrated briefing to drive best practice”, Hourigan explains.
• The In-house Forum will be led by Tracy Stallard, Global VP, Experiential & In House Agency (draftLine) at AB InBev. “In-housing has become a major part of the marketing organization model, so moving forward we’ll be prioritizing agile ways of working, internal structures and how brands measure performance and success in what is a rapidly growing areas for many brands”, Stallard emphasises.
• The Marketing Capability Forum will be chaired by Becky Verano, Global Director of Marketing Operations and Capabilities at Reckitt, who sees that the forum “will look to share learnings around how you drive the data driven marketing agenda and enable a marketing culture for embracing diversity and inclusion as well as measuring the performance of engaging capability building programmes”.

The upcoming meetings include an Agency Management Forum session on 14 September on pitching, an In-House Forum session in September on capabilities and skill sets and a Marketing Capability Forum meeting on 20 October to discuss measurement.

You can find more about the WFA here.