Engine’s customer engagement agency Partners Andrews Aldridge is opening its first overseas office in New York and has hired George Pace as CEO. Pace was most recently the SVP and client partnership director of St. Louis-based CRM specialist Ansira and has also held senior posts at Arc and Ogilvy.
Partners works with E.ON, Santander, Nestlé, Rolls-Royce, Times Education Supplement and the British Army in the UK, creating digital content, customer experiences, website, apps, products and CRM programmes. It is headed by CEO Martin Nieri and founder and chairman Steve Aldridge.
In the new set up Pace will report to Rick Eiserman, the US CEO of Partners parent Engine. He will also work closely with Nieri, who will be responsible for growing the global Partners brand.
Pace says: “I look forward to drawing upon Partners’ rich success and heritage to build out a new type of agency in New York where data and creative co-exist. As our management team forms we all have one shared vision that today’s market place is changing and we will be using technology and data to power more impactful and precise creative engagements on behalf of our clients.”
Nieri says: “This is a hugely exciting time for Partners. We’re an agency that puts the customer at the heart of everything, and never before has that been more important and relevant to clients. There’s a huge opportunity to bring our mix of creativity, digital and data expertise and customer-centric thinking to the US, and now feels like exactly the right time to do so.”
Partners New York will be based in Engine’s New York office on Park Avenue South. Engine also has US offices in Los Angeles, St Louis, Cincinnati, San Francisco and New Jersey. Engine was bought by Lake Capital in August 2014 and now has more than 2000 employees working in over 30 locations across four continents. Partners is the first UK-based Engine agency to open an office abroad since the Lake Capital deal, with more expected to follow later this year.
