Staff Reporters
Jun 25, 2019

GPJ opens office in Auckland

The experiential agency has appointed a native Kiwi, Tomaz Kljakovic, as NZ country manager.

Tomaz Kljakovic
Tomaz Kljakovic

Experiential agency George P. Johnson (GPJ) has expanded opened an office in Auckland and appointed Kiwi Tomaz Kljakovic as New Zealand country manager.

Kljakovic previously led GPJ’s business development team in Australia. He has also held senior national and regional sales and operations roles with Exhibitions and Trade Fairs, as national sales manager for IMG Culinary, as senior account manager for Asia Pacific at McCorkell & Associates, and as regional account director at Zomato.

“I’m looking forward to bringing GPJ’s global knowledge, experience and network to the brilliant Kiwis and Kiwi brands increasingly being recognised globally," Kljakovic said in a release. "Consumers increased desire for adoption and integration of experiences makes it a very exciting time to be working in this space. It’s great to be home with my whanau and friends and lead GPJ’s local operations to assist brands establish themselves in NZ and increase the country’s experiential profile.”

Ben Taylor, Asia Pacific CEO of Project Worldwide said it was the right time to formally launch GPJ into the NZ market. “We are seeing exciting growth in exports by New Zealand brands and increasing interest in New Zealand as an experiences destination from clients globally," he said, adding that Project Worldwide recently acquired Auckland agency Darkhorse, which is "already enjoying great collaboration and synergy with GPJ". 

Caleb Bush, senior vice president and managing director of GPJ ANZ and managing director of Project ANZ, cited the opening of the new International Convention Centre in Auckland as another factor. "[Its] impressive roster of international sporting and political events slated for NZ will create even more opportunities for GPJ, our clients and the country to shine on the domestic and world stage,” he said.

GPJ has been working in the NZ market with IBM since 2000, established Transformation Day for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and delivered major events including the opening ceremony of the 2015 Cricket World Cup in Christchurch.

Source:
CEI

Related Articles

Just Published

8 hours ago

Moves and wins roundup: Week of October 2, 2023

A new month and new moves and wins from the World Federation of Advertisers, The Advertising Standards Council of India, Viddsee and more.

8 hours ago

CJ taps Tyroo to offer APAC advertisers access to ...

The partnership hopes to offer advertisers a number of insights including shopper event tracking, integrations with e-commerce platforms, program management tools, and data analytics.

9 hours ago

Allison PR vows not to work with fossil fuel industry

The Stagwell firm is the largest agency to sign anti-fossil fuel industry group Clean Creatives’ pledge.

9 hours ago

Asia-Pacific Power List 2023: Yajuan Wang (Zhiheng),...

National influencing app in China, under the leadership of Wang, is now building comprehensive products’ word-of-mouth marketing mechanism to tackle pain points for brands.