Eric Descombes

Eric joined FCB in January 2016 as head of the FCB Mexico office. His goal was to get the agency back to exponential growth. He is working on creating a high-performance team that exceeds market dynamics. In this effort, he developed the first Artificial Intelligence platform in Mexico as an advertising model with new tools: FCB Cognitive Cloud, FCB Behavioral Lab and FCB Dynamic Creative - tools that are part of an FCB global initiative. Under Eric's leadership, FCB has quickly scaled to the 5th position in the Mexican agency ranking.

His previous job was as CEO of McGraw-Hill Education for Latin America. At MHE, he transformed the LATAM sales team into a digital sales force for the major markets of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, which also helped smaller markets to develop faster. Digital is part of Eric's DNA, and he brought that knowledge to bear in his expansion of digital platforms at MHE. He also began to develop Direct to Student (DTS) strategies to accelerate growth. During the time he was at MHE, digital sales grew by 700%.

Eric founded his first company, Interfaz401, in 1992. The company focused on creating digital marketing and developments in both the Internet and intranet at a time when the Internet was just beginning to develop in the world. Interfaz401 was acquired by Ogilvy in 2000, eventually becoming its operation known as Ogilvy Interactive. During the almost 8 years Eric worked at Ogilvy, he was General Manager of several business areas: OgilvyOne (Data & CRM), Ogilvy Healthworld (Health) and Ogilvy Interactive (Digital & Digital Media).

In 2008, Eric moved to join the team of Experian Latin America, a company that specialized in Big Data (Buró de crédito, Decision Analytics, Credit Scoring, Marketing Data Mining). At Experian, he opened offices in LATAM and participated in the acquisition of Serasa in Brazil, as well as the integration of a marketing services unit in Serasa.

From Experian Eric returned to the WPP holding company as president of the Mexico office of Young & Rubicam. He was in charge of the group's strategy and was specifically tasked with transitioning the group into the new digital era. The agency went from #9 to #1 in agency rankings in Mexico, and doubled its size in two years.

Eric is an electronic engineer from the Technological Institute of Monterrey. He also participated in the Babson Catalyst program for Business Administration & Management. He is a non-executive member of several Mexican companies (e.g., Café Punta del Ciero, Vicky Form, Game Planet, Blue Messaging, Social Metrics, among others) as well as an entrepreneur in technology companies such as Machina Wearable Technologies.