Tor Myhren speaks! Apple's marketing man on a decade of shepherding the world's most sterling brand (exclusive)

"“At that time, there was no real precedent of an agency creative making a move like this,” Myhren says. “I foolishly thought my global role in a big agency network would prepare me for the size of Apple. I was wrong. It was a totally different scale and scope.”"

"Michael Houston-former CEO at Grey, and currently the outgoing U.S. president of WPP-was Myhren's boss at the time. He remembers exactly when Myhren told him he was leaving the agency. It was late 2015, and they were in a car skirting Switzerland's Lake Geneva."

"They had just finished their annual “top-to-top” meetings with the leadership of Nestlé. By all measures, it had been a wildly successful meeting. When Myhren joined Grey New York in 2007 it was known as a Death Star of old-school advertising. By 2015, at the height of the agency's turnaround, Grey had won 113 Cannes Lions across its offices in 18 countries. Everything was clicking."

"But on that drive, Myhren turned to Houston and told him he'd been speaking with Apple CEO Tim Cook. He was going to Apple. And that he wouldn't have left the team at Grey for any other company. “Beyond processing the shock of the news, I remember sitting there thinking that the very things that had just made our . . . meeting so successful were the exact things that would make him right for Apple,” Houston says."

A marketing communications executive joined Apple in 2016 after helping transform a traditional advertising agency into a leading creative shop. The move surprised the ad industry because there was little precedent for an agency creative making a shift of that magnitude. The executive said a global role in a large agency network did not prepare him for Apple’s scale and scope. His former boss recalled the decision during a drive after successful leadership meetings with Nestlé, noting that the same factors behind the agency’s success would make the executive a strong fit for Apple. The executive later moved to Cupertino to lead Apple’s sophisticated marketing operations.

Read at Fast Company