Park & Battery Appoints Paul Birks-Hay as President

Aug. 14, 2025

Park & Battery, the independent global marketing & advertising agency, has named Paul Birks-Hay to the role of president, following a period of increased headcount and new business wins.

The appointment allows incumbent Michael Ruby, co-founder of Park & Battery, to intensify focus on his other role of Chief Creative Officer. His fellow co-founder Ted Kohnen remains in his role of CEO.

As President of Park & Battery, Birks-Hay joins the agency’s Executive Leadership Team, taking responsibility for global client service and project delivery, ensuring that the agency maintains quality as it scales internationally.

Birks-Hay has extensive experience in agency and client-side roles, most recently as CMO for Hamsa, a breakthrough fintech payment platform which he co-founded and helped grow to a $250m valuation in less than five years.

Prior to that, he was Partner and President at the San Francisco-based creative agency Venables Bell & Partners, and Managing Partner at AMV BBDO in London, where he started his career in 1997. Throughout his career, Birks-Hay has worked on brands including Audi, Chipotle, Google, REI, Diageo and Mercedes-Benz, earning a reputation for driving transformative campaigns.

He arrives at a time of momentum for the agency, which has bucked the industry-wide trend for shrinking workforces and increased its headcount by over 20% in the past 12 months in the US, Mexico and the UK. Driving this growth are recent new business wins in the healthcare and biotech sectors.

Paul Birks-Hay, President of Park & Battery, said:

“Ted and Mike have built an incredible agency, in an incredibly short period of time. The intelligence and creativity that their entire team pours into every brief has allowed them to quickly rise up the rankings, and I am excited to help them continue their journey to the top.”

 

Ted Kohnen, Co-founder and CEO of Park & Battery, said:

“We hadn’t expected to be in a position to bring in someone at this level so early in our journey. Meeting Paul felt like a rare bit of serendipity: he has a combination of top-tier agency leadership and deep client management and marketing experience that makes him the ideal person to lead our Park & Battery teams. The fact that he was open to a new challenge at the exact moment we were looking to grow made it a perfect fit.”

 

Michael Ruby, Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Park & Battery, said:

“Paul is one of those people who’s done big things, led world-class teams and still has the energy and optimism of someone just getting started. That’s the vibe we’ve built Park & Battery on. His arrival lets me lean even further into the creative innovation that makes us special—and gives us another powerhouse at the helm to help steer what’s next. I’m so excited to have Paul with us to lead the way forward.”

 

Park & Battery was founded in 2022 by Ruby and Kohnen, some 20 years after they first met as colleagues at a New York creative agency. It has rapidly built a reputation for campaigns that prioritize creativity to deliver results, leading the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) to name the company an Agency of the Year in 2023, 2024 and 2025. The agency also shortlisted at the 2025 Cannes Lions for its breakthrough “Talking Commercial Plumbing” campaign for Roto-Rooter—the first time it has entered.

The agency’s client roster includes Meta, Kaiser Permanente, UBS, Jack in the Box, Roto Rooter, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Acxiom and Oakland Roots SC.