Sean Lyons

Sean Lyons currently serves as R/GA’s Global Chief Executive Officer and has worked at R/GA for over 11 years over two separate tenures. Since his return to the company in 2015, Sean has overseen the growth of R/GA in the US, establishing strong leadership teams in Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Portland and San Francisco and fostering strong bonds between the company’s US and regional offices. He has also worked to ensure that there is true integration across R/GA’s ventures, consulting, products and services, and marketing capabilities.

Prior to his return to R/GA, Sean was Global Chief Digital Officer and Managing Partner of Havas Worldwide. In that role he was the executive lead on all digital efforts across the global network while also co-managing the New York office, the network’s largest. He managed a group of fully integrated clients including IBM, Hershey’s, Dos Equis, and Liberty Mutual. Globally, he oversaw the development of the network’s digital strategy, experience design, social marketing, digital production, and technology teams.

Lyons first joined R/GA in 2005 as an Executive Technical Director and quickly rose to become a Managing Director leading the Nike account. During that time he oversaw one of the most awarded teams in the business, directing innovative projects across the Nike portfolio, including Nike Running, Nike Basketball, NIKEiD, and Nike+. In 2012 he was promoted to SVP, Operations & Business Planning and was responsible for reorienting R/GA’s organizational structure to make it more nimble, enabling the company to serve clients better and provide more diverse opportunities for its talent. He was also instrumental in establishing R/GA Buenos Aires, now a significant, award-winning, full-service agency in the LATAM region.

In 1999 Sean joined Oven Digital, a founding Silicon Alley agency that, like R/GA, attracted an eclectic staff that spanned technology and creativity. At Oven, Sean was the Head of Rich Media and managed a large team of animators and developers. He developed one of the very first dynamic e-commerce sites built with Flash for Tiffany & Co. The award-winning site helped prove luxury brands could beautifully and effectively sell their products on the web. It also showed how Flash could be used for more than enabling sophisticated web design and could be used for enterprise level e-commerce

In 2001 Sean literally wrote the book on Flash with Flash Architecture and Integration. The book, written before XD was an established discipline, was created to help designers and developers create platforms on Flash.

Sean was born and raised in the suburbs of New York where he studied fine arts (drawing, painting, and sculpture) from the age of ten. He attended Carnegie Mellon University and graduated in 1998 with a BFA in Painting and Electronic Media. His first job out of college was as a gallery assistant at David Zwirner’s SoHo gallery where he once had to run down a thief who had stolen a valuable piece of sculpture.