Weber Shandwick announces two new roles at the London agency, promoting Lucie Harper to managing director of London client experience & health and Emma Thompson to managing director of London operations & consumer.

These new positions have been created as the agency evolves its model to put clients first by running the business as just one P&L.

Last year showed strong performance across the board at Weber Shandwick London, with 30% year-on-year growth of its top 40 clients. The agency continues to invest in planning, creative, digital, content and production and is seeing a strong start to 2016, with recent significant client wins with British Gas and The Avis Budget Group.

Rachel Friend, managing director of Weber Shandwick London, says, “Weber Shandwick continues to push the boundaries of PR, going beyond our traditional scope to transform client engagements in our dynamic industry. As we continue to evolve our agency model, I am delighted to promote Lucie and Emma into these important new roles to enable us to stay ahead of our competitors and put our clients and innovation at the heart of every decision we make.”

New managing director of the London client experience & health, Lucie Harper has a proven track record, having led the health practice for ten years, with an outstanding double digit growth in 2015. She has inspired her team to focus on client needs today and tomorrow, resulting in great success for some of our largest client engagements. Harper’s primary focus will be to work closely with Cathy Calhoun, Nick Stravs and the global client experience team to deliver a London-focused programme and to culturally change the focus of the agency from practice to client-centric.

On the other hand, new managing director of London operations and consumer marketing, Emma Thompson has led the consumer marketing team to double digit growth for the last six years. She has a personal passion for client engagements and the team here in London which take her beyond the consumer marketing practice. She understands the impact of embracing innovation and new talent to transform client programmes. In her new London operations role, Thompson's primary responsibility will be to work to manage the financial operations from 5 P&Ls to just one and to deploy the specialists in the agency to work on our client assignments.