Vice Media has a new president at Virtue, and she arrives with the kind of pedigree holding companies put on the marquee when they need clients to stop asking about balance sheets. Shannon Washington, formerly chief creative officer at R/GA and McCann's Gotham, is taking the wheel just as the agency plots a formal rebrand.
The announcement comes wrapped in standard holding-company poetry. Vice tapped Washington to "bring the company’s advertising, entertainment and production businesses closer together."
In agency accounting, pulling three separate units closer together is what you do when running three distinct payrolls stops making sense. Advertising, entertainment, and production used to operate as three different buildings, three sets of executive overhead, and three separate pitch teams chasing three separate margins. Putting all three under one creative president collapses three distinct cost centers into a single conference room.
Washington gets the title of president and creative leader, which means she inherits the job of convincing brand procurement that a media brand's internal studio, its commercial shop, and its production pipeline are a seamless creative ecosystem rather than three struggling divisions sharing an invoice. Clients buy creative authority, not restructuring memos. Giving a seasoned CCO the masthead gives Vice a shiny front door while the back office quietly consolidates the floor plan.
Rebranding Virtue gives the trade press something fresh to photograph. The actual trade is simpler: Vice needed one person to run three divisions for the overhead of one, and Washington now gets to find out how many distinct line items fit inside a single agency pitch deck.