Yaron Farizon quits MediaCom after 15 years to join Adge.AI

UK: Fifteen years at one network is a rare thing in advertising, and rarer still is walking away from it at the top. Yaron Farizon has just done exactly that, stepping out of MediaCom after more than 15 formative years to join Adge.AI as head of enterprise sales and solutions, a start-up built from inception as a creative intelligence operating system and recently acquired by Publicis Production.

The move caps a career that tracked MediaCom’s own global evolution almost step for step. Farizon joined the network in 2010 and spent years leading planning for Procter & Gamble across Eastern Europe out of Moscow, before rising to chief executive officer of MediaCom Russia in 2018, a post he held for over three years through considerable market turbulence. He then relocated to Sydney to become chief executive of MediaCom Australia in 2021, before being elevated to global client president in 2022, a role he continued to hold through the network’s rebrand into EssenceMediacom, right up until his exit this July.

That breadth, London, Moscow and Sydney across nearly two decades, is precisely the kind of cross-market client leadership experience that makes the Adge.AI bet interesting. The start-up’s pitch is genuine integration across creative, media and production, stitched together using technology rather than committee, and Farizon is characteristically candid about what drew him in, calling the challenge of driving true integration for clients a dream, and a stretch in the most unexpected ways. It is not the language of someone leaving reluctantly. It is the language of someone chasing a harder problem on purpose.

Farizon has been equally clear about what MediaCom gave him. He describes the network as his place of strength for many years, crediting Eyal Ben Shalom, Eimear Larkin and Ogan Çaylayık for the opportunity to discover new ways of working, and making plain that the many people and leaders he worked alongside will have a special place in his heart regardless of where he goes next. It reads less like a departure and more like an acknowledgement that the next chapter needed a genuinely different kind of company to make sense.

For Adge.AI, landing a client president with nearly two decades of P&G and global network experience, and a demonstrated belief in people-first leadership and diversity, is a strong signal of intent as it scales inside the Publicis fold. For Farizon, it looks like exactly the kind of stretch he says he was after: a fierce start-up, a fresh problem, and, by his own account, a dream worth chasing.