TBWA Sydney has made its managing director position redundant, with Tanya Vragalis leaving the role after three years.
Vragalis, who first joined the advertising agency in 2018 as head of business management, has held key client relationships with Amazon, Optus, and CUB/Great Northern Brewing Co.
She was promoted to general manager of TBWA Sydney in 2020 before assuming the role of MD in October 2021.
“Tanya has been a valued and much respected leader in our agency for the past six years,” Paul Bradbury, President and Regional CEO, TBWA Australia & New Zealand, told Mediaweek
“Tanya deeply cares about her clients, the work and the team around her. We will miss her talent and her calming, caring humanity and positivity. Tanya leaves TBWA with enormous respect and admiration from us all.”
The news comes as the advertising industry grapples with ongoing economic pressures.
In February, UM made redundancies across Sydney and Melbourne.
Last month, two of WPP’s creative agencies – AKQA and Grey – were operationally merged, three and a half years after they were combined globally to form the AKQA Group. As a result, whiteGREY CEO Lee Simpson will leave the business because the whiteGREY brand will disappear.
It marked the holdco’s second merger in six months. In October 2023, WPP consolidated Wunderman Thompson and VMLY&R into the single entity, VML.
Vragalis’ exit comes a week after TBWA’s joint agency venture built for Telstra, +61, launched its first work. The creative partnership – home to the largest advertising account in the country – also unites independent creative studio Bear Meets Eagle On Fire (BMEOF) and Telstra’s existing media agency, TBWA’s Omnicom stablemate, OMD.
See also:
First Telstra work from +61, From Space to Your Place, launches
UM veteran Andrew Murray exits; agency makes redundancies
WPP announces merger of Wunderman Thompson and VMLY&R to create VML