The American returns to the region after eight years in the US with a brief to sharpen the newly-acquired WPP digital network’s creative offering across its six offices.
Though known to be strong on effectiveness and back-end digital services, the agency has struggled to prove its creative credentials - a weakness that cost the agency a pitch for the 2008 Aviva Ironman triathlon in December. Sklar has also been tasked to explore ways in which Blue’s clients can go beyond the internet and into offline marketing.
"It is much harder for traditional agencies to try to learn data, segmentation and optimisation than it is for Blue to take our existing online creative leadership and apply it to the next generation of TV ads, where time-shifting and place-shifting are the new realities,” said Jay Shapiro, global CEO of Blue. “Josh is a rare gem in our industry, merging these two worlds.”
Sklar returns to the industry from the Texas Association of School Boards, where he was the director of online communications. He also had a spell at XM New York, where he was chief creative officer. He left Asia in 2000, when he was CEO and ECD of XM Asia-Pacific.
“Having been a founding employee of the first digital ad agency in Asia (XM), I was here at the beginning of the revolution and I’m getting a distinct, similar feeling that the industry is about to go through another one,” said Sklar.
He will begin working with a client base that includes Hewlett Packard, SAP, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Intercontinental Hotels and Singapore Airlines, an account he worked on while at XM.
Blue was acquired by WPP in June last year, but has held on to its status as an independent network. The agency has offices in Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, London, Palo Alto and Singapore, the place of its birth.
