72andSunny

72andSunny wins the global creative account for Booking.com, a major travel and hospitality brand

Leadership read: Alliances broaden the commercial surface, and the leadership need follows. 72andSunny's partnership in the sector widens demand for commercial and alliance leaders who turn an agreement into realised value. Across EMEA, watch whether dedicated senior ownership is put on it; unowned alliances quietly lapse.

curated · 2026-09-07 · context →

72andSunny partnered with Female Quotient to launch an executive apprenticeship program for women athletes, announced at Flavor Flav's SHE Weekend

Leadership read: 72andSunny has committed real organizational capacity here, not just a sponsorship logo. Running an executive apprenticeship requires curriculum design, cohort management, employer-side mentorship infrastructure, and ongoing accountability to outcomes for the participants. That is a programmatic operating investment that sits closer to a talent-development function than to a brand-marketing activation, and it ties the agency's own executive bench directly to the program's credibility. The related-signals set for this period is broad: 12 partnership signals tracked across the last 90 days, spanning fintech, travel, biotech, and hospitality. Almost none of them share a structural profile with this one. The closest analog in spirit is Marriott's appointment of Alex Eala as a regional ambassador, which also treats an athlete's career transition as a commercial and brand asset simultaneously. The 72andSunny move is distinctively programmatic rather than endorsement-led, which makes it less a partnership in the conventional marketing sense and more a talent-pipeline initiative wearing partnership branding. Across agencies and media companies building athlete-facing programs at this stage, the functional pressure tends to concentrate in two areas: talent partnerships leadership with sports-property fluency rather than traditional media-buying experience, and DEI program operations capability that can hold accountability standards under public scrutiny. The market is moving toward operators who can bridge commercial storytelling with structured workforce development, a pairing that remains genuinely scarce in the creative services sector.

curated · 2026-07-17 · context →

CCO Wesley Hawes departed, replaced by Nic Buckingham as ECD

Leadership read: The structural shift here is not the departure itself but the role reconfiguration beneath it. Replacing a CCO, a commercially oriented creative executive, with an ECD signals that 72andSunny Sydney is repositioning the leadership function away from client and revenue accountability and back toward craft and creative output. That is a deliberate choice about where the agency believes its competitive leverage actually sits, and it commits the Sydney office to a model where creative direction leads and commercial ownership lives elsewhere on the org chart, or remains unfilled for now. The related signals in this batch are too dispersed across sectors, pharma, agriculture, financial services, auto, to constitute a meaningful creative-industry pattern. The one exception worth noting: Lyndsey Corona's exit from Ogilvy U.S. after under a year in role, and Fremantle's replacement of a scripted chief at the global level. Taken together with the 72andSunny move, there is a thin but visible pattern of short-tenure senior creative and commercial leadership exits across media and agency businesses in early 2026, suggesting that role-fit friction at the intersection of creative and commercial accountability is running higher than usual in this corridor. Across agencies and content businesses navigating that friction, the market is moving toward operators who can hold creative authority and client-commercial tension simultaneously, a functional seam that sits between ECD-level craft leadership and GM-level revenue ownership.

curated · 2026-05-07 · context →