Creative Planning hires Ovi Vitas as chief marketing officer

Creative Planning, the $780 billion Overland Park, Kansas RIA, has hired Ovi Vitas as chief marketing officer, pulling in a marketer from outside asset management distribution whose resume runs through Marriott Vacations, Reebok and EA Sports. He announced the move on LinkedIn after leaving AmeriLife, the insurance and annuity provider where he held a similar post. He succeeds Nick Jacobson, who left Creative Planning in August to explore other options after more than 25 years in financial services marketing.

Mallouk's email framing emphasizes building the marketing organization as much as the brand itself. Vitas brings a record of building brands and marketing organizations at businesses going through significant growth and transformation, and at AmeriLife he built and then scaled a centralized marketing setup. That is the work that follows a firm which keeps buying other firms—a cost story before it is a revenue story.

International is where a brand has room to earn its keep. In March Creative Planning completed its acquisition of London-based MASECO LLP, adding 123 employees and more than $5 billion in assets, after an earlier deal for Switzerland-based Baseline Wealth Management, which oversaw about $1 billion. Mallouk told the Wealth Management EDGE conference in June that he had no interest in taking the firm public. He has spent years positioning it as a national brand able to compete with the wirehouses; its first national advertising campaign ran in 2019, and the article describes the firm as taking pole position among privately held RIAs in the United States.

PWD's records show a $295.6 billion business with 320,323 accounts and 1,650 employees as of early October. The $780 billion in client assets the firm cites across the U.S. and Europe is roughly 2.6 times that figure; the two numbers count different things, and the marketing budget is spent against the larger one.

Other aggregators are chasing brand awareness too, and a consumer marketer is a bet that the next stretch of growth is won with clients and recruits as much as with purchased books—an inference unconfirmed by the company. The harder observation is organizational: the AmeriLife template Mallouk described is a centralized function reporting into leadership, and Creative Planning has spent this year buying institutional standing rather than books of business, as its move for the consulting gatekeeper RVK shows.

The near-term test is whether London and Switzerland get campaigns of their own, or whether Vitas's brief is narrower: one name and one marketing function, installed across everything the firm has bought.