Outspoken media executive David Verklin will be leaving Aegis Media, parent of Carat.
Some of the duties of Mr. Verklin, who was CEO of Aegis Media Americas, will be assumed by Sarah Fay, CEO of Carat and Isobar in the U.S. She has been named CEO of Aegis North America.
Aegis also created a new unit, Aegis Media Latin America, which will report directly to Mainardo de Nardis, CEO of Aegis Media Global.
“I have had the privilege of establishing Aegis Media from scratch across the Americas,” Mr. Verklin said in a statement. “Many of the most interesting times of my career have come in the past decade, in a marketplace changing almost by the hour. However, Aegis Media has a long pedigree in driving change and revolution. I have watched Sarah go from strength to strength in our business over the past 10 years, and I know that Aegis Media will scale new heights under a new generation of leaders.”
Mr. Verklin said he had been discussing his departure from Aegis for 13 months. After marking his 52nd birthday and 10th anniversary with the company, he said, he felt the timing was right, especially after putting his hand-picked successor in place and melding Carat’s traditional media and digital units together.
“There’s not much left to accomplish here,” he said.
He said he was planning to take some time off, and hadn’t accepted a new position yet. He said he was considering a range of possibilities, but he wasn’t likely to return to the agency business.
Mr. Verklin also said his departure was not linked to rough times at Carat, which has lost a string of important accounts over the past year. Most of those losses were caused by outside forces—the acquisition of client Pfizer by Johnson & Johnson, Time Warner’s decision to shutter client New Line—and not a reflection of the work the agency was doing.
(10:30 p.m.: Added final four paragraphs)