Palace signs global planning guru Keith Newton

The Campaign Palace has added more firepower to its strategic offering, signing one of the world’s top planners to lead the agency’s revamped Australian line-up. Keith Newton, currently a worldwide group planning director at Ogilvy, based in New York, will join the Palace next month as the national planning director for the agency.

Newton has had a stellar career in planning in Australia, Europe and the US. At Y&R New York he ran one of the largest planning departments on Madison Avenue, and was also manager of creative strategy worldwide. He has worked across leading brands in fast food, FMCG, soft drinks, fashion and finance. He is on Ogilvy’s global planning council and is a regular judge on the global and US Effie Awards.

The Campaign Palace national CEO Jacques Burger said Newton‚s hire wasa tremendous coup for the agency: “Keith is undoubtedly one of the bestplanners in the world. He has done some groundbreaking work on thelikes of Stolichnaya, Nestle and DuPont and the depth of his experienceacross numerous marketing disciplines is truly awesome. Smart,intuitive, experienced and also a helluva nice bloke, he will be avaluable asset to the Palace team.”

Newton served as planning and regional planning director of Y&R inAustralia for some years before transferring to New York more than adecade ago where he rebuilt the Y&R planning department and workedclosely with WPP’s global planning head, Jon Steel. He was also waspart of the original team that created Y&R’s highly regarded BrandAsset Valuator study.

“Keith helped me greatly in recruiting and training the New York-basedtalent on WPP’s Fellowship Program,” says Steel. “He’s both a terrificplanner and a great mentor.”

Newton’s appointment follows hard on the heels of that of high profiledigital strategist/ planner Megan Hales who joined the agency two weeksago following stints at Hyro and Saatchi.

Burger said that planning is a keystone of the Palace‚s offering andthat the latest appointments would bring a new level of insight andexperience to clients: “The people with the best people win. It is assimple as that.”