McKinney has appointed its first president in five years and first female president in its 54-year history. Gretchen Walsh, previously chief client officer at the agency, will be taking on the role effective immediately.

Walsh, who joined McKinney in 2004, has held multiple roles within the agency across media, strategy and new business. Her next role will still include managing clients but will also consist of leading the agency from a day-to-day basis across its offices in Durham, North Carolina; New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Phoenix.

She will report to McKinney CEO Joe Maglio, who said the move was necessary to help manage the agency, which has grown from 110 employees since he joined in 2018 to 329 employees. While Walsh will continue to work with her clients, her new role will be focused on day-to-day operations specifically around integrating the different parts of McKinney, which it has been building out over the past few years. 

This includes areas such as its media arm, health and wellness practice (launched last year) and its influencer expertise, which was added after it acquired influencer agency August United in January along with performance media company Tailwind.

“My success in this new role is really about building that integrated ecosystem,” Walsh said. “When I look forward 12 months or 24 months, I want to be able to have more clients, which we are already seeing, use more of our different capabilities to untap their potential and have those work together. And I think building the cases of that success is going to be a big part of what I do.”

A decision hasn't been made on a new chief client officer, according to a spokeswoman for the agency.

Momentum and perception

Despite being around for over five decades, McKinney still remains somewhat under the radar according to Steve Boehler, founding partner of consultancy Mercer Island Group.

“McKinney is a fine agency,” Boehler said. “They aren’t specifically requested by name by our clients… which puts them in the same position as most agencies. Unaided awareness of agencies is low and is a big challenge for most agencies.”

Another consultant called McKinney an “ascendant shop” that typically fares well in reviews.

In April, McKinney picked up creative agency of record responsibilities for Popeyes, which was a big win for the agency. Other recent wins include being named U.S. AOR for pharmaceutical company Indivior, Blue Diamond Growers and Puma Running. It also counts ESPN, Natural Light, Samsung and Pampers as clients. 

Battling perception isn’t something new for Maglio, who said the agency had other perception issues when he took on the role in 2018, including being viewed as a “traditional TV agency” and being dubbed a “regional agency” because it’s headquartered in Durham. 

Maglio’s focus has been on positioning McKinney as more than a core creative agency. 

“I think one of the first things we did was really just expand that aperture and say, there are things we do really well, let's really create a foundation and almost label what those things are that we do really well,” Maglio said.

Key growth areas

McKinney’s focus on influencer marketing is an example of that. With the January acquisition of Audacious Studios—which owned influencer agency August United and performance marketing business Tailwind—the goal has been to integrate influencer marketing across the agency beyond content creation. This includes business development, research and product development.

“We are actively building it into our business development process,” said Katie Marti, who previously was president of Audacious Studios and is now managing director at McKinney. “And it may not even be discreetly influencer work that we're selling. It could be for a creative AOR … We can do a level of research with the influencers themselves, bring that feedback to the brand and have that inform the upfront approach to a campaign or approach to even product development.”

Meanwhile, McKinney’s health and wellness practice has grown in the past year from six employees to 40, according to Michael McNamara, managing director of McKinney Health. Beyond its health clients, the practice also works on brands such as Blue Diamond and Stop & Shop, which last year launched a campaign centered around wellness.

The agency’s media practice, which consists of 50 employees, is involved in every pitch, even if there isn’t a specific media remit, according to Walsh, who said clients are often asking for input from the media team. Currently, 30% of McKinney’s clients are media only and 35% are full-service clients.

Winning Popeyes

Winning the Popeyes account in April was a big moment for the agency. Maglio said the situation is different than when it won Little Caesars in 2019. At that time, Maglio said, it felt like the agency needed a “high profile” win.

Jeff Klein, who joined Popeyes as its chief marketing officer in 2022 and helped the brand pick McKinney, was previously the CMO of Little Caesars when McKinney won that account. The CMO is where the similarities end in terms of the brands’ impact on the agency, according to Maglio.

Winning Little Caesars helped open doors for the agency and debunk the perception of being a regional agency, Maglio said. Since its partnership started, McKinney has helped create the chain’s first Super Bowl ad and build its digital presence.

“We have overhauled our entire approach to amplifying digital sales for our brand,” said Greg Hamilton, the current CMO of Little Caesars, citing brand activations and social media efforts. “We're the number one pizza brand on TikTok. And that is due very significantly to the really effective work that McKinney has built.”

Maglio said he was surprised by how much attention the Popeyes pitch got in the advertising world. While some may have felt that McKinney, which was named interim agency of record prior to the actual pitch, was favored to win the Popeyes account given the agency’s history with Klein, Maglio said it was actually “harder” than a normal review process.

“If you ask anybody at McKinney, it was not easier, and in fact, I think most people will tell you it was harder in part because we were really trying to separate what we were doing for the interim work versus what we were doing in the pitch scenario because they were very different,” Maglio said.

Maglio also said while it's good to have a prior relationship with a CMO it could also hurt an agency’s “element of surprise” when pitching. For Popeyes, McKinney set out to prove it knew the industry beyond pizza.

“A big part of it was making it clear that we understand your exact business model and your exact audience and don't think about it as we're the pizza people in this room,” Maglio said. “There was data that we brought forward in a way that I think if I look back to the Little Caesars pitch, we probably didn't four years ago. ... We felt we really had to lean in to show that we had a quantitative understanding of the market opportunity. They're very different brands, not only very different business models.”

McKinney’s first campaign for Popeyes since being appointed AOR emphasizes the chain’s New Orleans roots. It launched in late April.

Next steps

Moving forward, McKinney is working to minimize silos internally. It is also building out a data-driven proprietary tool that has already helped inform strategy for clients such as Choice Hotels and Little Caesars, according to Jasmine Dadlani, the agency’s chief strategy officer.

Maglio said he is cognizant of not losing the agency’s Durham identity as it grows.

“It's still our biggest office,” Maglio said of Durham. “I would never want to lose that foundation.”