iProspect North America Elevates Aimée Carricato to Chief Growth Officer

iProspect has promoted Aimée Carricato to chief growth officer for North America, tasking her with building on a period of rapid expansion for the dentsu media agency.

Under Aimée’s leadership as growth officer last year, iProspect was named the Fastest Growing Agency in RECMA’s bi-annual rankings. During 2025, the agency onboarded 15 new clients, winning 61% of its competitive pitches – and that momentum is continuing into 2026.

iProspect’s growth team takes a unified approach to both new business and organic growth, which helped them push on, says Aimée, with big tech clients Salesforce and eBay in 2025. This way of working is particularly effective within verticals for the agency, where new business growth “trickles down” into organic growth – especially in areas like retail, which makes up around 40% of iProspect’s business.

This was proven in 2025, when the agency saw retail brands like Dollar General, Hy-Vee and BJ’s Wholesale Club all come through the door. “They were three sides of the same story, but all had different entry points… It’s the same philosophy: for all our teams to have different relationships with those clients, but then be able to grow and expand them from either an enterprise or loyalty capacity, or from an RMN or data piece of the business, or the larger media capacity. So it's all growth in one shape or another, but our teams are able to take that unified approach and expand upon it.”

While a majority of the agency’s pipeline has traditionally come from mid-market work – whether from legacy clients or new ones acquired from the 2023 Merkle merger, Aimée suggests that 2026 might be bucking the trend.

“Maybe it’s coming off an election year, with the regulated industry settling down, but we’re seeing that tier one is really on the rise at the beginning of the year. We've been successful in the mid-market and want to keep that constant, but we also want to elevate ourselves and get ourselves out there a little more within that tier one set, now that we have found successes with our friends like Hilton, Abercrombie, Salesforce and eBay.”

Organic growth was a primary focus for Aimée when she first joined the iProspect team, and she is now hoping to capitalise on the agency’s prior work by further embracing the agency’s ‘born restless’ mantra in 2026. This translates to a proactive mentality – a need to be forward-facing, not just with existing clients but even internally in wrap-up reports and quarterly reviews – that makes them adept at organic growth.

“In the industry right now, this is coming to light with the likes of AI roadmaps – [thinking about] the next bot that's going to make us more efficient, or how teams are utilising technology or offshore resources to push the boundaries and stay the next step ahead.

It’s this entrepreneurial spirit and tech enterprising that Aimée believes will help iProspect North America succeed in 2026. "Foundationally, I have the benefit of a large growth team, and we embed our growth team leads within the portfolio set, so they have the ability to get ahead on these proactive tasks.

“The MDs aren't coming to my team and saying, ‘We have X, Y, and Z opportunities’,” she explains, “We're actually identifying those [ourselves] – like when there are new leadership changes or a new product line, or when we anticipate some client moves. They work with the MDs in their verticals and are always reviewing, just as much as their MDs are, to stay really connected on those proactive opportunities.”

For the year ahead, one of Aimée’s main goals is to adopt more of a “machine attitude” in the growth team. “We are doing so many things so well and it's once you get to a point where those repeatable tasks are things you don't have to put a lot of thought into, you make so much more room for the proactive, and the higher level thought and strategy.”

To achieve this, she plans to upscale training and ensure MD pairings with growth leads are “more unified across the operational, so that they can be swapped in and out a little more interchangeably”. She says, “Being able to switch it up and borrow learnings from different industries and other sets of talent is where we're going to focus first.”

The second step is to “mine from within”, to grow opportunities for which the talent and technology is already available at the organisation. Aimée has set a target of mid-2026 to have this all in place.

As for the back half of the year, she outlines plans for more concentrated efforts in commercial innovation. “Once we probably see the end of this trend of consolidations, and see how indies react to some things, we'll want to iterate too on some commercial change… So mid-year will probably be our pivot point to really push on some commercial changes that we'll need to do and bring to market.”

She predicts some of these changes to be around specialised resources for performance and retail, and packaging best-in-class capabilities in efficient ways, circling the intersection of media and content as a nucleus – and something iProspect has experience in. “Because of our size, we can be super nimble with that, and we've been there before. We're really interested in hearing from clients that are looking to capitalise on that whole landscape where performance and content are coming together.”

Aimée is also keeping a close eye on RMN (retail media network) spending this year, which will inform the business’ strategy if it starts to outpace traditional TV media spend. Not to mention the continuing industry consolidation, and its associated challenges.

However, Aimée is optimistic that these uneasy times present some fortunate opportunities for iProspect’s 2026 – primarily: helping the agency to enter various verticals they don’t currently have a presence in.

“We have to find the ability to break into those marketplaces with a specific client and prove that we can do it,” she says. “It would really interest us to get a new skillset and get a larger or mid-market client in a regulated sector that we haven’t historically been working in, like sports betting or crypto. Having one of those clients shake out of the consolidation would be great!”

The biggest challenge for media agencies in 2026, however, is “making the content work harder”, shares Aimée.

“It’s no longer the old adage of ‘right content, right person, right time, right place…’. It’s really about customising that content so all of it is being useful. We’ll have to be super specific, with technology, to make sure there’s not wasted dollars for clients moving forward.”