Bec McCall, group creative director at Australian agency HERO, has resigned to launch We Were Here, an independent creative studio operating without the holding-company infrastructure that defined her previous decade. The move comes as HERO, part of the Enero Group network, continues restructuring around consolidated service lines—a model McCall is now explicitly rejecting.
McCall spent the past several years building HERO's creative reputation, contributing to campaigns that won recognition at Cannes Lions and local effectiveness awards. Before HERO, she held senior creative roles at agencies including Clemenger BBDO and Publicis, where she worked on heritage brands in the travel, retail, and premium-goods categories. We Were Here launched with no disclosed client roster, no venture backing, and no announced staff beyond McCall herself. The studio's positioning statement emphasizes "direct collaboration" and "single point of accountability"—language that translates to McCall serving as both creative lead and client contact without intermediary account layers.
The departure follows a broader pattern among mid-career creative directors who built reputations inside holding-company agencies and are now exiting before reaching C-suite roles. In Australia alone, four senior creatives launched independent studios in the past 18 months, most citing frustration with procurement-driven pitch processes and shrinking creative mandates. McCall's timing coincides with WPP's recent announcement of a £500 million cost-reduction program through 2028, which includes collapsing regional agencies into four global units—a structure that reduces the creative director role to execution rather than strategy.
For luxury and travel brands, the signal is structural: the creative talent that historically sat inside full-service agencies is now available for direct hire, but without the media-buying leverage or production scale those agencies provided. A single-family office commissioning a brand campaign through We Were Here gains McCall's direct attention but loses access to HERO's Enero-backed media planning, SEO infrastructure, and multi-market activation teams. That trade-off works for principals running $50 million to $200 million marketing budgets who already have media relationships and want creative that doesn't require consensus across five internal stakeholders. It fails for brands needing integrated campaigns across paid, owned, and earned channels.
The studio model also introduces execution risk. McCall now carries producer, account director, and creative director responsibilities without the buffer a larger agency provides when timelines compress or client demands shift mid-project. Independent studios typically charge 20% to 35% less than holding-company agencies for equivalent creative work, but that discount reflects reduced overhead, not reduced complexity. Brands working with We Were Here will need to staff project management internally or accept longer revision cycles.
What operators should watch: whether McCall hires a dedicated producer or account lead within six months, which would signal she's moving toward a boutique agency model rather than remaining solo. Also watch whether We Were Here announces a hospitality or luxury retail client by Q2 2025—McCall's prior work skewed toward consumer packaged goods, and a shift into premium categories would indicate intentional repositioning. Finally, track whether Enero responds by promoting a replacement group CD at HERO or consolidates the role into a regional structure, which would confirm the holding company is prioritizing cost efficiency over creative leadership retention.
McCall's LinkedIn profile went live with the We Were Here branding on the same day HERO's Sydney office posted an opening for a senior creative role reporting to the managing director—not to a creative director. The vacancy describes the position as "integrated campaign execution," not "creative leadership." That language clarifies what McCall was no longer willing to do.
The takeaway
Award-tier CD exits holding-company agency for solo studio as WPP cost cuts reshape creative director role into execution function.
Want the 60-second program for your specific event?
Enter your event and email — we build it and send the branded proposal before lunch. No obligation.
The branded-identity layer Chiefs of Staff and heritage CMOs route through — your name imprinted on real authorized stock, your pick of 200+ brands and 70,000 products, shipped from one accountable house. Nine editorial desks publish the intelligence those operators read before they sign.
200+authorized brands
70,000products · virtual proof on each
9 deskspublishing daily
1997one house, since
70,000 SKUs · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · blind-shipped · ASI #217876
Your next customer won't visit your website. Their AI will.
AI assistants have quietly taken over the first step of buying — they answer from catalogs they can read and shortlist whoever can actually ship. Two questions now decide whether you exist to that buyer: can a machine read your catalog, and can you fulfill the order. Most brands fail one or both and never find out why the orders went elsewhere. The winners of this shift aren't the loudest. They're the most readable. Build for the machine that's about to do the shopping.
Built by the craft floor — apparel, media, packaging, and secure print.
This trade runs on hands, not desks. Imprint manufacturing & Komori heritage press through approved vendors · Canon high-speed secure-media operations is a craft floor — genuine Six Sigma discipline applied to ink, thread, foil, and registration, where a hundredth of an inch is the difference between a brand that reads serious and one that reads cheap. POPS4 is built by exactly those operators: independent, boots-on-the-ground engineers who carry their own book, read a client in microseconds, and put their name on every run. Beyond our own Virginia Beach floor, we work with a vetted network of craft manufacturers across the US — each meeting the highest excellence in QC standards in the industry, each a specialist in its own discipline — so apparel, hard-goods imprinting, media manufacturing, packaging, and secure printing all go to the bench built for them, coordinated from one accountable hub. Short-run from twenty-five units, volume to five hundred thousand. Two hundred authorized national brands, seventy thousand SKUs with virtual proofing on every one. Art archived for instant reorders. Net-thirty corporate terms, NDA-standard white-label — your name on the work, or none at all.
Strategy, positioning, identity, creative, and messaging — wired into an AI system that publishes and distributes on its own. Nine editorial desks generate the authority, the production house ships the physical proof, and the attribution layer tells you which post sold which SKU. What you get is an operating layer — content, catalog, and order path under one roof — that keeps working whether or not you are in the room. Built for principals who would rather own the machine than rent the agency.
Named-account programs — one desk, quiet delivery, NDA-standard.
One point of contact who already knows the file, so nothing restarts from zero between engagements. The work ships blind, under NDA, with your name on it or none at all. Built for single-family offices, heritage-house CMOs, sports-ownership groups, and the agencies that white-label our production. The relationship is the product; the merch is the proof of it.
SFO · Chief of Staff desk. Principal household, properties, aircraft, yacht, calendar, philanthropy — one file.
Shop seventy thousand products. Virtual proof on every one. 24/7.
Drop your logo on any product and see the virtual proof before asking. Quote routes direct to the desk. MCP catalog for AI agents. Celeste for the fast conversation. Full self-service checkout in development.