Cella consultant Tom Klug has more than 25 years of experience in building and managing creative teams for agencies including; his own shop, a Fortune 200 in-house group, and national marketing organizations. With creative roots, Tom truly understands the nuances and realities it takes to lead creative teams with strategic planning, personnel development and organizational design. His balance of strategic and creative thinking provides innovative yet actionable ideas focused on improving a team’s performance and confidence.

Organizational Design and Resource Planning
Optimizing a creative team to provide efficient service and produce effective results is an ongoing challenge. With demand, funding and external support always in a state of flux; flexibility and nimbleness is a necessity. Tom has built multi-site creative teams from scratch, reorganized large corporate staffs and managed external agency relationships. He also has extensive expertise in direct marketing and understands the best practices and disciplines needed to build an effective process.

Leadership Team Evaluation and Development
Understanding what makes creatives “tick” is not an easy task, but Tom has mentored, managed and trained hundreds of diverse individuals over his career. This enables him to evaluate and build high performing leadership teams through a process that aligns business objectives to talent. It starts by evaluating individual skills, personalities and aspirations in relationship to the organization’s culture, career pathways and performance expectations. Establishing proper job fit is the precursor to developing high performing leaders through an integrated team development plan.

Direct Marketing Operations Best Practices
Tom’s extensive experience in managing direct marketing teams enables him to help organizations with building an efficient and effective operation. From scoping to channel execution, Tom can uncover the process and talent gaps then provide recommendations and action plans to deliver measurable improvements. This includes evaluating the process of the account/client engagement, briefing, data usage, measurement, project management and the creative development/review process.

Managing In-House Resources with External Agencies
Most organizations need to properly balance in-house staffing with external agency rosters to maximize productivity while minimizing costs. Tom managed both models and understands how to leverage their strengths to structure and monitor a flexible, yet stable blend of properly aligned resources. Evaluating competency requirements, budgets, talent and demand fluctuations are key factors that will drive a strategy to successfully blend in-house and external agency support.

Brand Development and Governance
In-house agencies are typically accountable for implementing and managing the organization’s brand. This is especially critical during rebranding efforts or product launches, of which Tom has extensive expertise. By understanding an organization’s marketing and channel execution process, Tom can help build a governance model that ensures brand continuity and consistency—regardless of whether the work is accomplished by an internal or external team. Training, tools and ongoing metrics are also instrumental in building a strong and enduring brand and are part of his purview.