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HUGE Adds Communications and Media Talent as Client List Expands

Rapidly growing digital shop taps PR and journalism vet Tom Siebert for key communications role to team with online media strategist Tessa Barrera

October 30, 2009

BROOKLYN — Coming off a series of blue chip client wins, breakthrough work and a rapidly rising leadership role in the digital marketing universe, interactive agency HUGE has made two key hires in the areas of communications and media strategy.

Former journalist turned public relations specialist Tom Siebert has been named Director of Communications; Tessa Barrera has been named Media Strategist, reporting to Siebert. Siebert will set strategic direction for the company’s outreach to the media, while Ms. Barrera will be a voice in the worlds of social media, blogging and other digital content for both HUGE and select clients.

“By bringing both Tom and Tessa aboard, I think we’ve immediately assembled a communications team with complementary skills and experiences that makes them second to none,” says Gene Liebel, Partner and Director of User Experience at HUGE.

HUGE’s recent accomplishments have been so newsworthy that PR outreach wasn’t even needed.  Last week, their work redesigning CNN’s website was unveiled to almost universal raves, with industry expert Shelly Palmer pegging it as “great….it does what you expect it to do, brilliantly….a tour de force in best practices audience measurement and packaging.”

Other HUGE clients include IKEA, JetBlue Airways, Walt Disney Company, iVillage, Time Inc. and Target.

“HUGE is connecting with clients, consumers and companies because they understand how the modern mind thinks about digital relationships with brands and information,” says Siebert. “I’m incredibly grateful to have been offered this opportunity, and I look forward to both helping them get out their message and learning from them.”

Siebert, 47, was most recently VP, Director, Corporate Communications at Initiative, where he headed the IPG media agency’s award-winning internal and external communications. Siebert helped evolve Initiative’s successful repositioning as a “media, marketing and digital company,” and led outreach efforts that culminated in Initiative being named Advertising Age and Adweek’s 2009 Media Agency of the Year, as well as numerous awards for agency executives and the company’s work.  

Before joining Initiative, Siebert’s career was spent toggling between journalism and corporate communications.  In addition to executive PR jobs at Havas’s MPG unit, based in New York, and Baltimore full-service shops Carton Donofrio Partners and Trahan, Burden & Charles, Siebert was Editor-at-Large for the leading media industry trade publication MediaPost, and ran Adweek’s Southeast bureau in 1999-2000. His writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Baltimore Sun, The Baltimore CityPaper, the Creative Loafing and Business Journal syndicates and many other online and traditional publications.  

A creative thinker as well as skilled communicator, Siebert concepted the award-winning Mad Men integration with Ad Age, which created a faux 1960 edition of the storied trade publication, seamlessly weaving stories from the AMC series’ plot with real life events from the period. While at MPG, he inspired 2004’s “MPG Lounge” at Cannes, the now oft-imitated wireless café along the Blvd. Croisett that became a magnet for clients and journalists. While working in the programming department at The Discovery Channel in his early 20s, he came up with the concept for the original “Shark Week,” albeit as a joke in a brainstorming session.

Ms. Barrera joins HUGE from Howcast Media, where she ran both marketing and public relations, driving online conversation through social media, content development and SEO, raising the company’s visibility by more than 300%. One highlight was coordinating press strategy with the White House, U.S. Department of State, Facebook, Google, YouTube, MTV and Columbia Law School for the Alliance of Youth Movements Summit in December 2008.

Previously, Ms. Barrera was publicist for Myriad Restaurant Group, which includes Nobu, Tribeca Grill, Mai House and Centrico. She has also served as Senior Advertising Review Specialist for the National Advertising Review Council, and for the 2004-05 baseball season she was the Brooklyn Cyclones’ mascot Pee-Wee. Ms. Barrera has a Masters in Archaeology and Screen Media from the University of Bristol, England, and a B.A. with honors in International Relations from Stanford University.
 
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CONTACTS:

Tom Siebert
tsiebert@hugeinc.com
O. 718.880.3735
C. 201.233.5458

Tessa Barrera
tbarrera@hugeinc.com
O. 718.880.3730