Anthony Wong arrived at East West Bank with an old advertising question that has only become more useful: did the work change anything? Not whether people saw it. Not whether they clicked, shared, or talked. Did perception move? Did behavior follow? Did the business feel the result? It is a practical question for a chief marketing officer joining a bank whose promise has always involved movement - money across borders, businesses across markets, families across generations.
In 2026, East West Bank named Wong executive vice president and chief marketing officer. The title brought him to Pasadena, but the shape of the assignment had been forming across a career in Hong Kong, Singapore, New York, San Francisco, and Greater China. He had advised brands, run brand experiences inside a hotel group, helped open a virtual bank, organized transformation work across a global agency group, and guided growth and marketing advisory at a consultancy. Each stop moved him a little closer to the machinery behind the message.
That is the interesting part of Wong's trajectory. The agency leader who once argued that communications should be evaluated as scientifically as any other boardroom investment kept walking through the doors that measurement opened. If marketing truly affects the business, the marketer eventually has to care about the product, the service, the data, the operating model, and the moment a promise meets a customer.
“Effectiveness in communications needs to be as scientific of an investment as any other decision in the boardroom for brands today.”Anthony Wong, on taking Ogilvy's worldwide effectiveness role
Learning to count what mattered
Wong studied economics at Harvard College, then earned an MBA at Harvard Business School, where he co-chaired the Entertainment & Media Club. Before advertising, he worked in investment banking and in the American media and entertainment industry. Those early worlds gave him two useful languages: the financial language of return and the cultural language of attention.
He joined Ogilvy in 2006. There, effectiveness was not a cleanup exercise performed after the creative work. It was a discipline for deciding what the work should accomplish. Wong rose through global brand management in China and across Asia Pacific. Campaign Asia named him Greater China Account Person of the Year in 2010 and Asia Pacific Account Person of the Year in 2014. His work touched effectiveness cases for Motorola, Dove, and Milo, campaigns that were judged not only by their polish but by the commercial evidence behind them.
The promotions accumulated. By 2015 he was Ogilvy's Worldwide Effectiveness Director, succeeding his mentor Tim Broadbent, and global client leader for Team Huawei, WPP's dedicated group for the technology company. The dual job combined a horizontal mandate across the agency with responsibility for one complicated global client. Theory had to survive contact with markets, teams, and deadlines.
Wong's public comments as a Cannes Lions Creative Effectiveness juror in 2016 sharpened the distinction. Much of the entered work, he observed, was efficient rather than effective. Conversation, sharing, and press coverage could lower the cost of reaching people. Those signals mattered, but they did not by themselves show a change in brand perception, sales, or profit. He was not dismissing attention. He was putting it in sequence.
Moving inside the experience
The next phase put Wong on the client side. At Shangri-La Group, where he served as executive vice president of brands, the object being marketed was not separate from the experience. A hotel brand lives in a reservation flow, a room, a welcome, a meal, and a recovery when something goes wrong. Digital transformation could not be reduced to a new website. It had to make the promise easier for guests to use.
Then came livi bank, one of Hong Kong's new virtual banks. Wong led marketing as livi opened to customers in August 2020. There were no branches to carry the identity. The interface was the branch. At launch, livi emphasized easy service, UnionPay QR payments, cash rewards, and a “Shake Shake” mechanic that revealed a surprise reward after a payment. It was a small piece of theater inside a financial transaction, but it also gave customers a reason to learn the behavior the bank wanted them to repeat.
When a product needs customers to learn a new habit, make the first repetition legible, useful, and a little rewarding.
Later that year Wong joined Publicis Groupe in a new role, Chief Client Officer for Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa. His brief covered client transformation, new solutions, and the assembly of capabilities across the group. The geography was broad, but the underlying work was familiar: connect technology, data, creative work, commerce, and customer experience so that an organization could operate differently, not simply sound different.
By 2024, Wong was a managing director at Accenture. In 2025, when the APAC Effies again named him a head of jury, his remit was Growth Services Lead for Greater China and Marketing Advisory Lead for Asia Pacific. He had returned to the awards program he chaired in 2017, but with more years spent inside operating transformation. His idea of effectiveness had acquired more moving parts.
He was also looking at what came next. In 2024, as a vice president of the Harvard Club of Hong Kong, Wong hosted a lunch about generative AI in marketing. The subject fit his pattern. New tools create a rush of visible output. The harder question arrives later: where do they improve judgment, service, speed, or economics?
A bank built around a crossing
East West Bank gives that question a particular setting. Founded in Los Angeles in 1973 as a savings institution serving the Chinese American community, it grew into a full-service commercial bank focused on the United States and Asia. It now operates more than 110 locations across the two regions and offers consumer, commercial, wealth, and cross-border banking services.
Its origin story is not ornamental. Immigrant and cross-border customers often encounter financial complexity before they encounter a product. Language, regulation, unfamiliar systems, and distance all sit inside the customer journey. For a business moving between Asia and the United States, a bank can be lender, translator, network, and risk manager at once. Marketing the institution means clarifying that practical role.
Wong joined while the bank was producing strong financial results. East West reported record full-year net income for 2025, and its first quarter of 2026 brought record quarterly fee income, loans, and deposits. The marketing challenge was therefore not a rescue. It was to give a growing institution a customer language broad enough for its products and specific enough for the communities it serves.
“An effective leader is one who takes risks. Uncertainties are everywhere, and even small decisions change outcomes.”Anthony Wong, Asia 21 Young Leaders profile
His first public chapter at the bank offered a clue about tone. Wong joined colleagues and San Gabriel Valley Habitat for Humanity volunteers helping finish the first home rebuilt in Altadena after the 2025 wildfires. Team members painted, installed, landscaped, and added exterior touches. For a new executive, it was an introduction conducted with work gloves rather than a launch deck.
Wong later wrote that in his first weeks he had seen the bank's customer-centered and purpose-driven organization at work through community rebuilding, record earnings, and support for arts and culture. He ended with the bank's line, “reach further.” The phrase matters because it can be tested. A promise about reach has to appear in access, advice, products, service, and outcomes.
The metric after the metric
There is a temptation to treat Wong's story as the familiar migration of an advertising executive toward consulting and technology. The more useful reading is narrower. He kept following the consequence of the work. A campaign produces attention. Attention may alter perception. Perception may change behavior. Behavior meets a product and an operation. Only then does the result become durable.
That chain explains why his résumé crosses categories. Motorola taught the economics of brand change. Dove and Milo connected insight to growth. Shangri-La made brand a physical service. livi made the interface the institution. Publicis and Accenture turned the assignment into transformation. East West Bank brings those strands into a regulated business built on trust.
It also explains the constraint. A financial brand cannot outrun the experience beneath it. Trust compounds slowly and can reverse quickly. The useful CMO is therefore part storyteller, part systems thinker, and part student of friction. The work includes deciding what not to promise.
Wong has spent years pressing creative work to show its evidence. In Pasadena, the evidence will appear in more places: how customers understand the bank, how easily they move through it, whether communities recognize themselves in it, and whether relationships grow. The final measure will not live in the marketing dashboard alone. That has been his point all along.