Dept hires Andrew Dimitriou as global chief client and growth officer

Dept has appointed Andrew Dimitriou as its global chief client and growth officer, the agency shared exclusively with Campaign US. He began in his new role last Monday, September 9.

Dimitriou will oversee Dept’s global growth, marketing and client services teams, comprising 500 people globally. He reports to global CEO Dimi Albers.

In the role, Dimitriou is responsible for scaling the business to accommodate for the growth it has undergone in the past few years and setting it up to achieve further expansion. In the past three years Dept said it has achieved 230% revenue growth driven in large part by its AI services. 

Dimitriou will be Dept’s first global chief client and growth officer, which an agency spokesperson said is a signal of its evolution from “a local specialist agency to a global technology and marketing services company” since its founding in 2015. It now works with “predominantly multi-service, international clients,” necessitating a growth executive at the global level.

“Now we need to put together client engagement programs and manage them as a company of 4,500 people, making sure we’re providing the Dept value of service consistently across all our clients,” he noted.

This spans current clients and new business opportunities, from “putting systems in place that one would expect a larger company to have around client engagement, to ensure we are the best partner we can be to our clients,” to ensuring sales and marketing are equipped to “take us to the next phase of growth,” he said.

On the sales and marketing side, he will work to elevate Dept’s reputation and capabilities to drive new business opportunities. 

That said, Dimitriou doesn’t expect to make major changes to the business. 

“I’ve been so impressed by what’s in place at the moment, so it’s just a matter of accelerating and amplifying that,” he noted. “The great exists here, so how do we highlight it, magnify it and operationalize it?”

Dimitriou most recently spent six years at VML, first as EMEA CEO, then as global chief business officer. Prior to that, he held various senior roles at WPP and Young & Rubicam. 

Having spent much of his career working at creative agencies, a shift to the media and technology side of the business could seem like a big change. But Dimitriou noted that his core training and responsibility has remained the same: “to solve clients’ business challenges.”

In his view, with digital-first and AI enabled capabilities, he is better able to “solve future problems,” he said. 

Alluding to AI, Dimitirou noted, “there is massive change going on everywhere in the industry and you have to have an inflection point to say, ‘where is the next 25 years of my career going to be?’