Austin Scott and Richard Harris Join Independent Creative and Performance Agency Union

Independent creative and performance agency Union recently made two key hires to its leadership team. Austin Scott came aboard as executive creative director and Richard Harris joined as data director.

An award-winning creative leader with a focus on transforming businesses through the power of creativity and innovation, Austin Scott is a digital native who has worked from coast to coast and hung his hat at FCB San Francisco, Leo Burnett, BBDO, Laughlin Constable, and EP+Co. Over the course of his career, he’s worked with a diverse group of clients—including Pepsi, Verizon, Lenovo, Bud Light, The UPS Store, AstraZeneca, and Raid Pest Control—facing a range of business challenges.

As the leader of Union’s creative department, Scott’s objective is inspiring his teams to integrate big narrative ideas across media, production and digital worlds, so they become seamless consumer experiences. He has also already been a key contributor in several successful new-business pitches, most recently Quility Insurance and NRG Energy.

“We found Austin after an exhaustive, nationwide search,” said Banks Wilson, president at Union. “He is constantly tinkering with new ideas and technologies, and I think that curiosity is core to the success he’s seen. Also, we have a very collaborative environment at Union, and Austin is a team player. We were looking for a creative director who could share the spotlight.”

As the digital and marketing landscape continue to evolve, his focus will be on building the agency of the future—and continually seeking out talent and partners who share that vision.

As data director, Richard Harris sees himself as the “Swiss Army Knife of digital analytics and data science.”

He cofounded a digital marketing agency while in college at the University of Oregon and spent four years gaining valuable experience in several different data sectors after he graduated and relocated to Dallas. Most recently, he was lead data scientist at iProspect and senior analyst of Digital Analytics at Live Area.

At Union, his job is to reimagine the data department—change the way the agency and its clients think about and ingest data. This encompasses a host of ambitious ideas including developing data science practices for marketing mix modeling and forecasting, building custom attribution to present and understand how marketing channels work together to influence recommendations, creating live reporting dashboards for marketing and website data, implementing new tracking processes, ensuring the agency is collecting and reporting on trustworthy data and building out new tools to impact decision-making across all practices.  

Harris also has digital advertising experience running paid search (Google ads, Bing ads), paid social (Facebook and Instagram), and display advertising (Google Display) campaigns, which allows him to bring a different perspective to Union’s marketing analysis.

“CMOs are being taken to task in the C suite to prove the return on investment of their efforts, and we were seeking new tools for analyzing and optimizing the performance of our campaigns,” added Wilson. “We needed a multifaceted data scientist—someone who can set up the data technology stack, analyze the data, and also do advanced data modeling and predictions, and Richard is unique in his ability to do each of those.”

These two hires cement Union’s positioning as a creative and performance agency by blending creativity and data in ways that drive memorable and measurable results.