McCann London has appointed Sheryl Marjoram to serve as its managing director. Marjoram joins from Saatchi & Saatchi where she was a managing partner, leading its Asda account. Before that, she worked at Mother, heading up the Atom Bank and Mondalez accounts, as well as new business. In the newly created role at McCann, she will work as part of the agency’s senior management to ensure the continued delivery of best-in-class service across its roster of clients as well as help provide leadership for the agency.
In her 20-year advertising career, Marjoram has also worked at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Ogilvy & Mather and Leith London and her appointment as MD marks a return to McCann after a 14-year break–when she previously worked there as a business director.
The agency has seen a number of promotions with Theo Izzard-Brown taking up the position of chief strategic officer in recognition of his significant contribution to the agency’s work and recent new business wins. Karen Crum has also been promoted to head of strategy, having previously been a planning partner on MasterCard.
Growth Brings Growing Pains–and Bots–To Bluesky
Bluesky has seen its user base soar since the U.S. presidential election, boosted by people seeking refuge from Elon Musk's X, which they view as increasingly leaning too far to the right given its owner's support of President-elect Donald Trump, or wanting an alternative to Meta's Threads and its algorithms.
The platform grew out of the company then known as Twitter, championed by its former CEO Jack Dorsey. Its decentralized approach to social networking was eventually intended to replace Twitter's core mechanic. That's unlikely now that the two companies have parted ways. But Bluesky's growth trajectory — with a user base that has more than doubled since October — could make it a serious competitor to other social platforms.
But with growth comes growing pains. It's not just human users who've been flocking to Bluesky but also bots, including those designed to create partisan division or direct users to junk websites.
The skyrocketing user base — now surpassing 25 million — is the biggest test yet for a relatively young platform that has branded itself as a social media alternative free of the problems plaguing its competitors. According to research firm Similarweb, Bluesky added 7.6 million monthly active app users on iOS and Android in November, an increase of 295.4% since October. It also saw 56.2 million desktop and mobile web visits, in the same period, up 189% from October.
Besides the U.S. elections, Bluesky also got a boost when X was briefly banned in Brazil.
"They got this spike in attention, they've crossed the threshold where it is now worth it for people to flood the platform with spam," said Laura Edelson, an assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern University and a member of Issue One's... Read More