The Institute of Communication Agencies (ICA) has announced Scott Knox will be its new president and CEO.
Knox was chosen after more than 500 people applied for the position. He arrives from the U.K. where, since 2001, he has served as managing director of the Marketing Agencies Association (MAA).
A well-known and active figure in the British industry, Knox oversaw the MAA (the U.K.’s equivalent of the ICA) as it quadrupled its membership. One of Campaign magazine’s A-List honourees, he also organized the MAA’s Marketing 4 StartUp Britain initiative and co-founded PrideAM, an organization for LGBTQ members of the industry. Moreover, he is the managing director of the DoDifferent Awards.
“He really is an advocate writ large,” said Penny Stevens, current chair of the ICA board of directors and president of Media Experts. “We weren’t looking for a soft-sell Canadian.”
Stevens pays much respect to Knox’s predecessors – former president Jani Yates and former CEO Gillian Graham – who were strong advocates in their own right. But Stevens says their mandate was “subtly different… it was more a managing role than a vigilante role, which is what I believe we have in Scott.”
That more forceful advocacy will be needed as the ICA is currently considering how to better represent its members and the industry as a whole to the government and marketers. Its board’s Futures Committee is tasked with examining how the organization must change in order to serve its members over the coming years, developing a three-year plan to “review and reevaluate the goals, mission and value” of the organization.
Stevens said that the four-member hiring committee made the “unanimous” decision to pursue Knox to drive this mandate after a lengthy Skype interview. “We were all on the edge of our seats,” she said. “After we got off [the call], we said ‘I want to hire him or work for him.'”
“The mandate I have been given from the ICA team couldn’t be clearer – we need to create an agenda that is brave, driven and proud,” said Knox in an email interview. “Across the world too many agencies are feeling pressured to deliver more for less, too much focus on spreadsheets and not enough on ideas and the value that strong agency partnerships bring. I am all for return on investment being at the top of the agenda for marketing spend, but collaboration and respect need to be included. I have witnessed far too many manoeuvres by corporations that stifle innovation and therefore results.”
The ICA undertook a global search with IQ Partners to fill what had been two distinct roles – president and CEO. Both Yates and Graham had announced their departures within months of each other earlier this year from the organization they’d helped renovate over the last decade. Yates is now president of the Advertising Standards Council, while Graham has yet to reveal her next career move. (Graham’s LinkedIn profile lists her current occupation as “hiking the Camino in Spain.”)
Knox assumes his new position in November.
