CEO of IPG-owned media agency Initiative, Lee Leggett, has left the top spot, AdNews understands.
Leggett, who had been in the role for two and a half years, was hired by former Australia CEO Henry Tajer despite having no media agency experience. The decision to exit could be to do with senior management changes across IPG Australia.
Her departure leaves Mindshare's Katie Rigg-Smith and Virginia Hyland as the remaining female media agency CEOs in Australia.
It's not clear whether Leggett has a role lined up or if a replacement CEO has been lined up internally. Initiative Australia also recently promoted Geoff Clarke to chief operating officer and Hannah Rook to national head of digital.
During her tenure Initiative has lost only one client – iNova – which moved to Vizeum in December was due to contractual review.
In May the agency won Cancer Council Australia account and last week Specsavers moved its $20m media account from MediaCom to Initiative.
It's the lastest shuffle in media agency CEOs following the news yesterday that OMD CEO Peter Horgan would take on the group CEO role at Omnicom following Leigh Terry's move to IPG as CEO of the APAC region.
Most of her career has been spent in creative and digital agenices in London, including Brand Union and Tribal DDB. Prior to joining Initiative she was CEO at creative agency Dare in London for seven years, in which time the agency grew from a handful of people to 250 and was named Digital Agency of the Decade by Campaign magazine in 2010. Leggett moved to Sydney in 2013 alongside husband Jaimes Leggett when he took over as CEO of M&C Saatchi.
Leggett was unavailable for comment, and IPG declined to comment on the move.
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