Barb Reilly Managing Partner /Group Account Director Arnold Worldwide
Barb Reilly is a Managing Partner /Group Account Director at Arnold Worldwide where she’s worked for 10 years. During this time, among many assignments, she led the charge for the much-talked-about, start-up JetBlue Airways during their first 2 years in operation. During that launch period, Barb and her team were responsible for launching 13 new markets and putting butts in seats for this noteworthy new airline.
For the past 6 years she has managed the rapid growth of Citizens Bank from the 28th largest bank in the country to the 8th, growing from 370+ branches to more than 1600 locations. In that stretch, the integrated work has generated not just significant sales results, but garnered awards, accolades and seen dramatic brand metric improvements. She also runs one of the top women’s retail brands, Talbots. In her group is one of Luxottica Retail’s largest brands, Pearle Vision, one of the country’s largest eyecare retail chains.
Barb has also spearheaded a unique discipline within Arnold, called Women’s Insights, a group dedicated to understanding the role women have on influencing in the background and purchasing products and services. For this effort, the agency won an assignment from Katie Couric on the Today Show to promote awareness of colorectal cancer among women.
Prior to that she worked at Houston Herstek Favat for 7 years before being acquired by Arnold. For six years at HHF she oversaw one of the agency’s award-winning accounts: Massachusetts Office of Travel & Tourism (MOTT) working to build pleasure and leisure travel to the Commonwealth. During her time on the account, tourism increased 3-10% annually, in a time when tourism nationally was declining.
Her 25-year advertising/marketing career includes working with such renowned clients as Ocean Spray Cranberries and Gillette Inc, at Ingalls, Quinn and Johnson. She made the switch to the Client side, after IQ&J and worked for Ocean Spray Cranberries until joining HHF.
For more years than she cares to admit, it was “work by day and school by night” as she attended evening classes at Northeastern University in Boston, for a degree in Business Administration/Communications, while she got her feet wet in the ad biz at a small agency in Boston called Allied Advertising. There she worked on Paramount Pictures as a media planner/buyer.
Over the years, she and her team are the recipients of one Emmy (for a pro bono effort) and four EFFIES (for work on MOTT, FDA, Citizens Bank and NCCRA) and one Cannes Lion (for Citizens).
In her spare time, she sits on the Board of the Salvation Army, is the Chairman of the Board of The AdClub and does volunteer work with children’s programs. She guest teaches at Babson College’s Graduate School of Management, and sits on the American Marketing Association’s EFFIE Steering Committee.
She lives in Walpole with her husband, two little girls and one big dog.