Shane McGonigle leaves the Marketing Institute of Ireland in December for a CMO job

Shane McGonigle will leave the Marketing Institute of Ireland in December and take a chief marketing officer job at a technology company. RTÉ and AdWorld both reported the departure on 25 September. He joined the institute in August 2022, so he will have led it for a little over four years.

Mark Nolan says the board already has its brief

Nolan, who chairs the board, thanked McGonigle for his leadership and said the institute has a clear mission and strategic direction. That framing matters for whoever comes next: the board is presenting this as continuity, not a reset.

The job goes out in October, the hire lands in Q1 2027

Advertising for the role starts in early October. The institute expects to appoint in the first quarter of 2027. An interim chief executive will cover the gap, so the body will run for at least one quarter without a permanent leader.

McGonigle ran Leo Burnett Ireland before the institute

His track record sits on both sides of the client line. He was chief executive of Leo Burnett in Ireland and a global director at JWT, where he worked on Baileys and Kraft Foods. He then moved client side as European strategic marketing director at Kerry Group, and later chief customer officer at the fintech MyComplianceOffice. He also teaches as a visiting professor at Ulster University and is a vice-president of the European Marketing Confederation.

Ireland’s marketing market has had a busy few months. Omnicom is closing FleishmanHillard’s Dublin office, and in advertising itself OpenAI hired Mark Bambury to run EMEA advertising from Dublin. Regulation keeps the country in the news too, after the Irish regulator fined Google over location data. Publishers there face the same traffic squeeze that drove Reach to cut 220 editorial jobs.

One date decides how disruptive this is. If the institute names a permanent chief executive early in 2027, the interim period covers a single quarter and the 2027 programme survives intact. If the search runs past March, an interim leader ends up setting the agenda for the year.