Facebook headhunts AUT alum
New Zealander and AUT alumni Mark D'Arcy has been head-hunted by Facebook to be its director of global creative solutions.
D'Arcy (39) who studied marketing and advertising at AUT University (when it was Auckland Technical Institute), joins Facebook from a previous position as president of Time Warner's Global Media Group. He was part of the team which came to New Zealand to resolve the Hobbit dispute in October last year.
The Wall Street Journal said that D'Arcy will lead a Facebook team with the task of boosting the appeal of the social network service's advertising offerings.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told the Journal that D'Arcy "understands that marketing can be more engaging and effective when it is social by design."
D'Arcy has been in the advertising game for more than 20 years. His first ad job was during his school holidays while attending Waitakere College in the display ad department of the New Zealand Herald newspaper, where his father worked. He liked it enough to realise he wanted to study advertising at AUT. His diploma in advertising and marketing took 18 months during which he worked part-time at a small agency on the North Shore.
After graduating D'Arcy was employed as a copywriter and then headhunted by DM&B (now part of Publicis) an international agency with clients such as Coca-Cola. By the age of 23 he was creative director and convinced the firm to send him to New York for two week's work experience.
"I went out and had a good time, but I worked like a lunatic too. I talked to anybody I could and when I got back I called people, especially the recruiters in the company, and said I really wanted a job. I didn't want to be a creative director; I just wanted a job."
In 1995 he was offered a position as vice president creative director in the New York office of DMB&B and then moved to Young & Rubicam. He returned to New Zealand for a year with his family in 2003 before returning to the US.
He recently told The Listener that AUT and Kea, an expat networking group, had helped him rekindle his ties with New Zealand.