Giant Spoon names Julie Berger as chief media officer

Berger will lead the agency’s integrated media team across all client accounts.

Giant Spoon named Julie Berger as its first chief media officer as the agency expands its media practice.

While Giant Spoon is known for award-winning experiential work, media planning and buying services have always been part of the agency’s core offering. Giant Spoon’s media team accounts for roughly a fifth of the agency’s employees across both Los Angeles and New York offices; media accounts for 25% of its annual revenue, according to the agency.

Based in Giant Spoon’s Los Angeles office, Berger will lead the agency’s integrated media team across all client accounts. Berger most recently led the investment practice for WPP’s EssenceMediacom. She was also a media client leader at Farmers Insurance and spent 10 years at Interpublic Group of Cos.’ Initiative Media.

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Effectively leveraging media has been the key to Giant Spoon’s success in its experiential campaigns to “not only reach and engage consumers but to shape and enhance their experience through ideas and creativity,” said Laura Correnti, partner at Giant Spoon.

This was what the agency did for the GE “Focus Takes Us Further” campaign in late 2022. Giant Spoon executed the first brand takeover in the history of The New York Times, buying out every ad placement in the Dec. 6 print issue.

“At Giant Spoon, we believe it’s one thing to buy impressions, it’s another thing to make one,” Correnti said. “For all of our brand partners, we strive to meet audiences where they are with the goal of being additive, not just adjacent to the media they’re consuming.”

Berger said the shift to an independent, integrated creative agency was what she was looking for after spending most of her 25-year career at holding companies. She said she wasn’t personally affected by any of the layoffs or mergers affecting the major holding companies, but she could “see the writing on the wall.”

“I knew that there was maybe not necessarily a role for me in the specific position that I was in long-term,” Berger said, adding she was looking for something different. “When you’re competing on cost efficiencies and lowest rates and procurement exercises, I just got a little bit tired of the rinse and repeat kind of work.”

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Aleda Stam is a senior reporter at Ad Age, covering creative and media ad agencies. She has a passion for the intersection of marketing with health care and sustainability practices. Stam previously covered public relations agencies and corporate communications as a senior reporter at PRWeek.