Mike Rosich had bought the tickets. Dinner, then Top of the Rock: a first date with Marissa, a view of New York, a respectable amount of planning. The weather had other arrangements. At Rockefeller Center, they learned that visibility was zero. They exchanged their tickets for another day. Rosich had managed to secure a second date before the first was properly under way. Dinner, at least, behaved itself.
They had met at an Alpha Kappa Psi pledge event in Tisch 201 at New York University. Friendship came first; dating followed months later. When he proposed, Rosich returned to Gould Plaza on an August morning. The place where they began became the place where they decided to continue. He graduated from Stern in 2010; Marissa graduated in 2012.
The rain story earns its place because it has something agency biographies usually lack: a plan that did not survive contact with the world, and a funny outcome. Nobody needed to declare a transformation. The tickets simply remained useful. Keep that modest adjustment in mind while considering a career spent moving between the people who make plans and the people who must make them work.
A creative strategist inherits the operating brief
By August 2020, Rosich was arriving at dna Communications as executive vice president and general manager of its New York office. His previous title at Marina Maher Communications had been executive director of creative strategy and storytelling. The new assignment added responsibility for strategy and operations. An idea could now arrive on his desk wearing several disguises: a client brief, a staffing question, an office decision.
Before Marina Maher, he had worked at Rosetta and Heartbeat. At MMC, his tenure lasted more than five years and included several roles. That sequence matters because it places the leadership appointment after a stretch of work inside agencies, with their different functions and competing demands. The appointment asked him to run dna’s New York office, drive innovation, and stay involved in client work. It was a substantial operating brief for someone whose recent title had emphasized creativity.
He reported to Laura Schoen. When Current Group was formed four years later, Rosich publicly thanked her for the opportunity and continued support, along with the wider leadership team. The acknowledgment supplies a useful counterweight to the solitary-executive story. His new job came with a history of working relationships. Those relationships appear in his account of how he reached it.
An agency needs a creative judgment and an operating judgment, sometimes about the same decision. A promising campaign still requires the right people, time, and delivery. A tidy operating plan still needs something worth producing. Rosich’s move from creative strategy into office leadership put both judgments inside one job. The career change gives the later group structure a practical antecedent: connecting functions was already part of the assignment.
Two names on the door
In June 2024, The Weber Shandwick Collective created Current Group, bringing Current Global and dna Communications under Rosich as CEO. He had become dna’s global president earlier that year. The agencies kept their separate brands. The announcement described a shared leadership arrangement, rather than a requirement that every existing identity disappear into the new name.
For an executive, keeping the names creates a particular obligation. The shared organization must give people a reason to work together while allowing them to retain expertise and relationships built elsewhere. A new label can be designed in an afternoon. Making it useful in the work is a longer undertaking. The distinction is visible in Current Group’s next stage.
In October 2025, the group announced a refreshed identity and a leadership team drawn from both agencies. Sara Baker, Pete Campisi, Afton Grier, Kristin Parchman, David Murphy-Colonna, and Jennifer Symmonds joined Rosich in that structure. He described leaders who could work within their agencies while contributing expertise across the group. The intention was to share resources and strategy without erasing the individual businesses.
The same changes included Executive Media and Presentation Excellence, a coaching program for senior leaders and spokespeople led by Angela Salerno-Robin. There is a pleasing specificity to that offering. An executive can have a title, an audience, and a message, yet still need help getting the three into the same room. Communications leadership includes the unglamorous business of helping someone say what they mean.
Current Global’s work spans consumer brands and corporate reputation; its partners include Applebee’s, The Clorox Company, Papa Johns, and Shamrock Farms. Rosich therefore leads a business where very different client situations share an organizational home. The interesting question is how those differences become useful to the people doing the work. The group’s chosen structure makes that question part of his job description.
dna Communications
Current Group
Weber Shandwick New York
Leave room for the peculiar
Rosich’s view of creativity contains a welcome permission to be odd. In a discussion of what communicators should watch for in 2025, he pointed toward ideas that feel off kilter, including things some people might consider unhinged. His interest was in the genuine surprise: the moment someone encounters an idea they have not seen or considered before.
This is a less comfortable prescription than simply asking for better content. Better can mean shorter, smoother, more tasteful, or more like the thing everyone already approved. Surprise asks the audience to notice a difference. It also asks the people developing the work to tolerate a little uncertainty before they can see whether the idea has legs.
The language is striking from an executive responsible for operations. An agency can develop a very orderly process for removing everything interesting. Meetings are remarkably capable of sanding a joke until it resembles a weather report. Rosich’s observation keeps the oddness in consideration. It gives the unfamiliar proposal a chance to be discussed before familiarity wins by default.
In his April 2025 conversation about midsize agencies, Rosich advocated a culture in which ideas compete on their merits. He connected creativity with an operation that starts from the audience and allows broader participation. That matters to the operating question: who gets heard before the campaign becomes a finished object? An organization’s answer can determine which possibilities survive.
There is no automatic connection between an unusual idea and a useful one. A surprise still has to belong to the brief and make sense to the people encountering it. Read together, Rosich’s public remarks place two demands on the work: earn attention and understand the audience. The difficulty lies in satisfying both, especially when the easiest internal approval may produce the least interesting external response.
“The absurdity is what’s going to break through, right?”Mike Rosich · 2025 outlook
The audience has a vote
At Cannes in 2025, Rosich discussed Current Global’s NSFW Pulse research in a podcast conversation with Maja Pawinska Sims. The study examined how people feel about brands entering controversial cultural and social debates. It found differences across political persuasion, age, and religion in whether consumers wanted companies to speak up. The audience, inconveniently for anyone seeking a single rule, contained several audiences.
The subject puts a sharper edge on the earlier creative argument. A surprising message does not land in an empty room. People arrive with beliefs, expectations, and histories of their own. Their reactions can differ even when they encounter precisely the same words. The research gives Rosich’s audience-first approach a concrete setting: brand speech in a divided public conversation.
For a communications business, that is a reason to ask more precise questions. Who will hear the message? What do those people expect from this particular company? What behavior will make the words credible? Those questions do not supply a convenient slogan. They supply work. Rosich’s discussion of the study belongs to the practical side of creativity, where a clever line meets the people expected to care.
The podcast format also reveals the scale of the problem. A short campaign can sit inside a much longer discussion about expectations and trust. Someone still has to turn that discussion into a decision. The executive’s role is to make space for the thinking before the work reaches its audience, including the possibility that different groups will hear the same statement differently.
A larger New York assignment
In July 2026, Rosich’s responsibilities expanded again. Weber Shandwick named him president of its New York operation while he continued to lead Current Group’s agencies. The announcement came alongside appointments for Michael Wehman as US president and Joy Farber Kolo as chief innovation and integration officer. Rosich’s job had grown from running one New York office to leading a group and taking on another New York remit.
The current office listing carries both titles. They express two scales of responsibility: a specific city operation and a group spanning distinct agencies. The practical challenge follows from the combination. A leader must understand what is happening close enough to the work to be useful, while making decisions that affect teams beyond the immediate room.
Recognition has accompanied those appointments. Rosich appears in PRWeek’s 2025 40 Under 40 class and in the Agency CEOs category of PRNEWS’s 2026 People of the Year. The earlier PRNEWS awards program also lists him among its 2017 Rising PR Stars while he was at Marina Maher Communications. These markers trace a public career from agency practitioner to agency leader; they do not remove the daily demands of either role.
Rosich’s public biography calls him a hybrid leader. It describes a career across planning, account management, digital strategy, content, operations, and creative work, along with dry humor and a serious resting expression. He holds a bachelor’s degree in marketing and economics from NYU Stern and serves as vice president of the Alpha Kappa Psi alumni board. Outside work, he lives in Chatham, New Jersey, with his wife, daughter, and dog.
The most interesting part of his current assignment is the continuing negotiation between order and invention. Keeping separate agencies connected takes structure. Letting unusual ideas get a fair hearing takes a willingness to leave a little room in that structure. His career has brought both demands closer together. The forecast remains uncertain, as any visitor to Rockefeller Center can tell you. The next date can still go ahead.