DDB Aotearoa’s Priya Patel on a Killer Year
Continuing our 2021 retrospective is Priya Patel who became DDB Group Aotearoa’s first-ever woman CEO in 2021. She shares with us the reasoning behind her move to New Zealand, where DDB Aotearoa is headed and what more needs to be done to create a more diverse industry in 2022.
2021 was…
Lively!
Aside from arriving in New Zealand to lockdown and MIQ, how’ve you found your time in the new position?
Overall, it’s been great. Having moved from another DDB office, culturally, the DNA is quite similar. It’s wonderful to be on the ground, even if it was over Teams initially, everyone I met was so welcoming and delightful. We’ve got a lovely leadership team, and meeting them and the 260 staff was interesting in the middle of lockdown. I was going to meet people in groups of 10 in real life, we were going to have a cup of coffee and a bacon sandwich, but this changed to Teams meets, which unintentionally turned into little focus groups. So quite the introduction!