Execs and Accounts for May 24, 2002

Wunderman has named Larry Rinaldi president of the Asia-Pacific region, responsible for overseeing and managing the Wunderman brand. Before joining Wunderman in London, Rinaldi was vice chairman of Ogilvy’s operations Greater China and president of Ogilvy’s IBM Services Asia-Pacific unit, based in Tokyo. He replaces Wolfgang Haf who will assume a new role as president and chief client officer in Wunderman’s Europe, Middle East/Africa region.

“The changes are part of a continuing global strategy to strengthen Wunderman’s leadership in every part of the world and leverage the expertise we develop in one part of the world throughout the Wunderman network,” said Wunderman CEO Daniel Morel said. “Rinaldi’s diverse experience on both sides of the advertising fence is a perfect complement to what we are trying to achieve in Asia.”

Christine Lehtonen, co-founder of San Francisco-based Maquette Online Media, has joined ID Creative Services as vice president of interactive services. In the role, Lehtonen will direct the development of all interactive branding programs, including Web sites, rich media e-mail, and kiosks. She will also foster ID’s interactive television practice.

Several of Maquette’s clients followed Lehtonen to ID, where she says they continue to benefit from her interactive brand experience while gaining the strength of a full-sized agency.

Solbright, a business process automation company that serves the digital ad industry, will provide its AdSuite solution to weather.com. Weather.com will use Solbright’s AdSuite for management of order entry, trafficking, billing reconciliation, and management reporting for interactive advertising.

Search123, a performance-based search engine, has named Tony Winders as vice president of marketing. Prior to accepting the role, Winders was president of iAgency, an early online marketing firm which he co-founded in 1995. During his time there, he built campaigns for Coca-Cola , DIRECTV and Universal.

“Tony is both a strategic thinker and a hands-on marketing professional,” said James Beriker, CEO of Search123. “He knows the online marketing space intimately, and is ideally equipped to articulate the competitive advantages of our pay-per-click technology to our target market segments and the industry as a whole.”

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