Arnaud Verchère

Head of Strategy / Managing Partner of Tonic International

Arnaud is known amongst Tonicians as the "difference-maker". Tonic is all his fault!

Prior to founding Tonic in 2004 Arnaud worked for 15 years in 6 of the Top 10 agencies in 6 different countries.

In 1988, he started his career in Paris as a copywriter and a communication consultant. 3 years later he moved to Montreal working as a French copywriter for Cossette, Tam-Tam and JWT.

For 3 years he moved to Singapore where he started in client servicing, first for DDB-Needham, and then for Lloyd Martin, a small creative agency not too dissimilar from Tonic.

Back to Paris in 1995, he became International Account Director on Peugeot for BETC Euro RSCG where he grew the business 5-fold from 6 to 55 countries.

In search of a new frontier, he joined McCann-Erickson in 1998 to head their Central Asia operations from Tashkent. For 2 years he worked on Coke, Unilever, Samsung, Goodyear and Nestlé and made the regional network profitable.

In 2000, McCann sent him to China to help restructure their client servicing in Greater China out of Shanghai. This was done faster than expected and a new challenge was due.

Wanting to move to a more creative network, he seized the opportunity when in 2001 BBDO offered him a position to manage the Pepsi business in the Middle East.

With Impact-BBDO (Dubai) he also honed his new business skills, as he became the de-facto head of planning. Thanks to Impact, it's also where he came up with the idea of Tonic and met his future partners. Tonic was founded in 2004. He never looked back.