Sarah Personette, President, UM U.S.
Age: 34
Sarah Personette might be one of the youngest media-agency presidents in the business, and after only 10 months in the top job, she’s made a dent. She spent the first five months reorganizing operations to focus more on rewarding talent and the agency’s learning and development program.
In the past five months she created an executive leadership team; restructured the social practice; embedded social-media leads in every department, such as buying, planning, search and research; and inked partnerships with digital companies like AOL, Innovid and Kiip as part of an effort to better inform real-time buying strategy.
While making all those changes, she helped the shop win the global Hershey account and retain and win more Nationwide business in the U.S. She’s balancing all that with a baby and another on the way. “I’m the first person to turn on lights in the office. I walk in at 7:15, get home to see my son between 6 and 8 p.m., when I’m not traveling, and I’m back online at 8,” she said. Ms. Personette was most recently at Facebook, where she built and led the network’s global agency team.
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