New CEO of Dentsu Aegis Network Switzerland
After five years as CEO of the Dentsu Aegis Network in Switzerland, Christof Kaufmann is leaving the network. He is succeeded by Thomas Spiegel, until now Managing Director of iProspect Austria-Adriatics-Switzerland, the performance and e-commerce agency of Dentsu Aegis.
"The timing is ideal," Christof Kaufmann (pictured above) said in a statement. "After a total of 15 years at the helm of the weightiest media agencies, at just under 47 years of age, I'm right at the intersection of full experience and full energy to know it all over again. At the same time, after the merger with Dentsu and the structuring in larger spaces - with Switzerland as part of the Central region, whose center is naturally in Vienna - the agency is also at an interface where the country head is given a different function."
The new CEO Dentsu Aegis Switzerland, Thomas Spiegel, knows both the network and Switzerland very well, according to the statement. Spiegel worked, after his MBA in Brussels, for several years at Google EMEA. In 2012, he took over iProspect Austria as managing director. Thanks to his deep digital expertise as well as his leadership skills, iProspect grew to become Austria's largest performance agency within three years. In 2015, he took over the overall regional responsibility for iProspect in the Central region (Austria-Switzerland- Adriatics).
As the new CEO of Dentsu Aegis Switzerland, the 32-year-old has clear goals: "I would like to continue the growth of the past years with my team. At the same time, however, we also want to set new impulses. dentsu Aegis Switzerland will stand even more clearly for the interweaving, the convergence, of digital and classic media. We want to set sustainable accents here, because modern communication today operates at eye level with consumers. Only brands that consistently act convergently across all media will survive in front of consumers in the long term." Spiegel will also move his center of life to Switzerland and live in Zurich. "I'm looking forward to Zurich! I like the city, the people, the culture here. I feel very welcome and can't wait to get started here."
As before, the Swiss management will work closely with Andreas Weiss, CEO Dentsu Aegis Network Central, and report to him. Dentsu Aegis Network is represented in Switzerland by Carat, Vizeum, isobar, IQ mobile, iProspect and Posterscope. More than 40 employees work at the Zurich location. The biggest customers include Red Bull, General Motors, Aldi, Helsana and Mondelez.
