Mark Renshaw

Mark has been mixing marketing and technology together in new ways for over 25 years. From starting and growing two companies, working internationally for over twenty years, connecting new technology and partners to brands, winning new business, starting and growing agency teams and capabilities, speaking at industry events, and most recently developing new practical approaches to big brands’ marketing challenges, Mark now leads Leo Burnett as Chief Innovation Officer. His charge is to help drive brand participation, break down technology, and make it easily understood and applied—a perfect role for someone who has helped to nurture and drive innovative, cross-channel, cross-discipline solutions throughout his career.

Mark had his first agency job at 15. That’s right, at 15 years old, Mark spent his free time learning brand strategy, creative development, desktop publishing and direct marketing.

Fast forward a few years. Upon graduating from the University of Western Sydney with a Bachelor of Commerce (Marketing), Mark had already owned his own business, consulted on marketing strategies for major brands, and had half a decade of technology-lead, real-world marketing and advertising experience under his belt.

After finishing university at the ripe young age of 23, Mark set up two “digital marketing” groups. One in an existing creative agency with three offices across Australia, and the second was his own business lead by five other directors. Mark setup and ran both these teams and expanded his own company over three years until it grew to 35 people.

Leo Burnett Australia, then asked Mark to be the first “digital marketing” employee on their existing team of over 200 people in 1998. As the Sydney office’s youngest executive vice president, he helped pioneer integrated, interactive marketing work for P&G, Heineken, Kellogg’s, Subaru, Diageo and Tourism New South Wales, winning awards for the work in Australia and globally.

Eventually, he expanded his relationship with P&G, creating branded content and exclusive TV, Internet and mobile marketing programs for them across Asia, years ahead of the branded entertainment and mobile boom. He then moved to Singapore in a regional role to introduce the same winning integrated model to all 14 offices in the APAC region, where he helped build innovative marketing solutions for P&G, McDonalds, GM, Tiger Beer, Singtel, Malaysia Airlines and HP.

Now, in his sixth year in Chicago where Mark was asked to play a global role, Mark is accelerating innovation across the entire agency in how the agency works, how it is structured and how it operates. His goal is exclusivity – doing what other agencies aren’t doing but want to do, and working with media and technology partners like no one else does.

When he’s not building Leo Burnett's reputation as a game-changing agency by innovating with the likes of Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft, he is focused on creating breakthrough work and new opportunities with global multinational brands/clients. This includes inspiring the agency's relationships with clients by providing new ways to think of today’s problems, and creating the most simple and powerful ways for brands to think and act differently.

In 2011, Mark lead what was the first and only agency team to create a new ad unit to run on Facebook. Mark’s team developed the first truly social ad format at the time, allowing people to comment on an ad, update their status and appear on a brand’s page. This new ad unit (the comment ad) has become the basis for Facebook’s approach to creating stories and is now a feature on all premium ad units. Mark pioneered that effort and worked directly with Facebook’s product development team, while all of Leo Burnett’s major clients used the new ad unit exclusively once launched.

Mark has also been asked to be a strategic advisor working directly at either the CMO, CEO or Board of Directors level with clients and partners. Often these roles are to provide strategic and practical advice on how brands should transform their approach to business and marketing.

Part of this role in inspiring teams and helping them create new opportunities has meant Mark has traveled extensively, presenting at both client and industry events such as the P&G Global Brand Building Awards, Cannes, Adage, AAF and Tedx, often with audiences up to 2000 people.

That’s the thing about Mark – he is entrusted to guide these massive client investments because time and again, he makes big ideas a reality and gets something tangible to the market with speed and scale.