Chris Cashen, the current vice president of IAPI and former managing partner with Mindshare, has been appointed as group head of strategy at GroupM Ireland.
Cashen’s new role will see him taking on responsibility for strategy and leadership across all the agency brands; Mindshare, Wavemaker, EssenceMediacom and Invention.
Cashen joined Mindshare in 2019, having previously worked for Javelin, Dentsu and AFA O’Meara/McConnells.
GroupM says that it has been “building the structure around its strategy team since a piece of research it commissioned in 2023 found that CMOs are prioritizing strategy, marketing effectiveness and measurement as the top three skill sets required by their marketing and agency teams.
“Further investment into strategic talent is a no brainer for us,” says Bill Kinlay, CEO, GoupM Ireland. Increasingly, this area is making a key difference for our clients business and making a massive contribution to client growth. The team is now in great shape to increase their impact across a greater portfolio of our clients.”
In addition to the appointment of Cashen, GroupM has also appointed Zoe Chandler from Wavemaker into the GroupM strategy team as strategy manager. Chandler has worked with Wavemaker for four years and was recently accepted into IAPI and Marketing Society’s STEPS mentoring program. She joins former Media Award’s Rising Star winner Ciara O’Connor on the strategy team, alongside Lina Meshael, strategy director, who joined from dentsu earlier this year.
Speaking about the appointment of Chandler to the GroupM strategy team, Cashen says: “Bringing Zoe into our strategy team makes perfect sense. Too often, we have waited for someone to grow into prominence in client leadership before considering them for strategic positions. That increasingly made less sense to us, and we want to work with Zoe to sharpen the obvious strategic skillset as part of the group offering.”
