French takes on pre-retirement tasks at DY&R

by LEITHEN FRANCIS, Media Asia 19-Apr-02

SINGAPORE: Ogilvy & Mather's global creative director Neil French will oversee regional creative responsibilities for WPP sister agency Dentsu Young & Rubicam ahead of his planned year-end retirement.

French said he would help DY&R for about eight months and would not renew his contract with Ogilvy when it expired in December.

"Sir Martin (Sorrell, WPP's group chief executive officer) felt the creative work at Y&R wasn't that exciting and a few people put my name forward to help fix things,

said French, who would split his time 25 per cent with DY&R and the remainder at Ogilvy this year.

French planned to evaluate "which DY&R offices have the best talent and chance of producing more visible work to try to concentrate on making those better".

"DY&R has really good people and it surprises me that the creative work isn't as special as it should be. DY&R Singapore should be the flagship office in terms of creative work because they are capable of doing great work."

Steigrad's role scaled back, p3.