LONDON — Golin has promoted Alex Wood to be its first chief creative officer in London, as the agency grows its integrated earned creative team across EMEA.

Wood (pictured), who joined Golin as executive creative director in 2016, has led recent work including Specsavers’ ‘The Misheard Version’ – the brand’s most commercially effective PR and social campaign ever – as well as Asics campaigns such as 'Dramatic Transformation', Training AI – a programme to train AI to understand what healthy exercise looks like – and, most recently, Little Reminders, the world’s youngest sport influencer team.

Before joining Golin, Wood led creative for PR and social at Ogilvy, and also held creative roles at agencies including Freuds, and Porter Novelli. His awards credits include Cannes Lions, One Show and PRovoke Media’s SABRE awards.

At the same time, Golin is also promoting Paul Andrews to executive creative director for design and content, to oversee healthcare creative alongside the agency’s design and content team.

The agency’s newly-integrated creative, design and content team is now made up of 20 people, including earned, conceptual and channel-specialist creatives and art directors, plus a new creative production division. More creative hires will be announced in the coming months.

Golin London president Ondine Whittington said: “Alex has spearheaded incredible creative momentum from London and leads the way in redefining the role of PR creative. His commitment to delivering earned-led creative, integrated across channels has unlocked phenomenal commercial effectiveness for our clients and shows the power of PR when it’s at the core of the marketing mix.

“Under Alex’s steerage, London has become a centre of creative excellence for Golin globally and gained industry recognition for our creative ideas. In his new role we can’t wait to take this creative approach to the next level.”

Wood added: “We’ve been on a journey to evolve the kind of creative work expected from an earned agency: bigger ideas, stronger craft, serious commercial effectiveness. There’s always industry debate about when it will be PR’s time in the marketing mix, but the right kind of earned-led ideas are making that time now. More of that is the goal and I’m excited for what comes next.”