P & L Agency
GTB (Team Detroit)

I joined Team Detroit (now GTB) in January of 2007,  the first day the group moved to its Dearborn campus, across the street from Ford Motor Company. Team Detroit was a joint venture formed by WPP agencies JWT, Y&R, Wunderman, Ogilvy, and GroupM (Mediaedge, Mindshare, and Mediacom). All agencies had different ways of working, including different P&L histories with the clients. 

The first order of business was to listen to the client and understand the current needs of the business. I created a strategic operational plan and digital media innovation plan based on the client's direction as well as input from all agency planning leads, business intelligence leaders, and digital planners reporting to me. 

Economic pressures quickly required the agency to rethink the staff allocation plan. Since digital media was still very new, it was a significant challenge to "defend" the staff needed to create plans, buy the media, and measure the outcomes properly. During that time, we were making the playbook for digital media. 

I sat side-by-side with the Team Detroit finance leads and Ford agency leads to negotiate the staffing plans needed to deliver Ford's target of 25% allocation to digital media.