Hasta La Creative!

CAA Marketing Co-Chief Creative Officer Jesse Coulter has announced he will be leaving the company. Mr. Coulter joined the marketing division of the Hollywood talent agency Creative Artists Agency in 2006 and is leaving on his own accord, in the hopes of moving onto his next creative pursuit, which is yet to be determined.

“I’ve been at CAA for nine years, and it’s time for a new challenge,” he said. “I came here from Wieden & Kennedy, and it was a leap of faith — I had wanted to try something new. I feel like I accomplished a lot, and now it’s on to the next challenge. I’m turning 39 this year, and I wanted to find new creative energy and push myself again. I came to CAA as a scared little boy, and I’m leaving as a scared little man. I think people are best in those situations.”

He’s joking when he says “little,” since Mr. Coulter stands well over 6 feet tall. He joined CAA as a creative director in 2006 after working as a creative at W&K, New York and eventually rose up the ranks to become co-CCO alongside Jae Goodman.

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A perfectly timed Friday news dump that went live after everyone had left their respective offices last week revealed that Wieden+Kennedy did not turn out to be the agency Weight Watchers needed to regain its self-confidence.

WW had been with McCann for more than seven years before moving its business to W+K without a review almost exactly one year ago. The change coincided with a big strategic shift for the client, which went from featuring celebrities like Jessica Simpson to exploring the psychology behind both the desire to snack and the challenges of maintaining one’s weight.

The agency’s first work, “If You’re Happy,” signaled that new direction:

“My Butt” made the psychological link even clearer:

Finally, the Super Bowl ad (which the client didn’t want to announce or tease before the Big Game) very specifically compared compulsive eating to drug addiction with the help of one Jesse Pinkman:

Most observers seemed to agree that this work was more memorable than past Weight Watchers campaigns, but that wasn’t good enough for the client.

The big factor here was money: in the last quarter of 2014, Weight Watchers posted its lowest revenue totals since 2010, and its valuation dipped to “its lowest point in history.”

It would seem that Americans, despite being fatter than ever, are no longer interested in using paid membership services to help manage their weight; they’re turning instead to free fitness apps and related “wearable” technologies. The fact that “half of the company’s revenue comes from meeting dues,” renders its model unsustainable.

The business must change or die, and — as noted in the Adweek post — its North American President Lesya Lysyj stepped down last month after joining Weight Watchers from Heineken in late 2013.

Regarding the agency/client relationship, Tom Blessington of W+K Portland writes:

“We are proud of the work we produced in the short time together.It was a great team and we wish them nothing but the best of luck.”

No word on when the company will announce Lysyj’s replacement, whether the creative review will affect Weight Watchers’ relationship with its other agencies (like digital AOR OgilvyOne), or whether future campaigns will continue to “focus on the real diet problems of real people.“

Don’t be a crash text dummy.

Kia Motors takes an unexpected turn in the war on texting and driving with a new ad that dramatically destroys letters of the alphabet, all to show that the moment you begin typing, you can no longer fully concentrate on the road.

In the dazzling minute-long spot, “Crash Text,” an “A” explodes in plumes of smoke and fire, an “N” slowly crumples as it burns, an “E” cracks and shatters like a windscreen during a highway crash, and an “X” drips blood. Each takes place in mesmerizing slow motion, with extreme attention to detail. It’s like a Sesame Street alphabet video run horribly amok, and defiling such familiar symbols with surprising brutality strikes a primal chord. (Liberty Mutual tried something similar a while back, substituting oversized, crumbling abbreviations like OMG, TXT and LOL for smashed cars, but Kia’s approach is more visceral.)

Richard Copping, ecd at Saatchi & Saatchi Dubai, calls the abstract style a deliberate departure from PSA norms, designed to laser-focus viewers’ attention on the act of texting while driving. “I hope that when people see the film, they will learn from it,” he says.

The spot, airing online and in cinemas, broke this week in Egypt, which has the highest number of road accidents per miles driven in the world, averaging about 12,000 auto fatalities in recent years. Like many countries, Egypt prohibits the use of cellphones while driving unless handsfree functionality is involved.

Hopefully, this campaign will remind drivers to follow the letter of the law.

(Via Design Taxi)

Buying stuff with phones, long relegated to a Silicon Valley pipe dream, may be ready to go mainstream. When summer comes, the three largest players in mobile — Apple, Google and Samsung — will each have competing touchless payment services available on the market. Each service aligns with its company’s evolution and goals. And each will first have to prove its worth to banks, retailers and, most importantly, shoppers.

Depending on how the chips fall, each mobile-payment option could have radically different implications for marketers hoping to connect an ad or offer an actual purchase.

On March 2 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Sundar Pichai, a senior VP at Google, briefly detailed the search giant’s latest move: Android Pay, a software layer that lets developers tool around with payment applications on Google-powered handsets. His talk came just weeks after Google inked a deal with three of the top national carriers for distribution of Google Wallet, its four-year-old payments product.

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“Cérebro, o que faremos amanhã à noite?”

“A mesma coisa que fazemos todas as noites, Pinky… Tentar conquistar o mundo!”

Quantas vezes você não ouviu essa frase ao longo de sua vida, marca registrada de uma das animações mais divertidas da Warner? Então, prepare-se, porque sua infância está prestes a ser destruída. A cortesia, mais uma vez, é da Animation Domination High-Def, que apresenta uma versão cientificamente acurada de “Pinky e o Cérebro” ao mostrar como é a realidade de um rato de laboratório.

Se na série animada criada por Tom Ruegger e Steven Spielberg os ratinhos de laboratório são fofos (com exceção do Cérebro) e inteligentes (com exceção do Pinky), na prática os bichinhos são vítimas de toda sorte de experimentos cruéis – o que tem motivado muitas campanhas contra testes de produtos em animais.

Aliás, pode ou não ter sido um objetivo da ADHD, mas que essa animação traz uma mensagem muito forte contra o uso de animais em laboratórios, ah, isso traz.

Supere o medo de ter sua infância destruída e dê o play.

Post originalmente publicado no Brainstorm #9
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McCann London hired Max Chanan in the position of creative director. Chanan will work alongside Creative Director Mike Oughton and report to Rob Doubal and Laurence Thomson, joint CCOs and agency presidents.

Chanan arrives from AKQA, where he spent over two years as an associate creative director, working on campaigns for Nike. Prior to AKQA, he served two-year stints at DDB and Sid Lee in Amsterdam. Chanan has worked for McCann before, having arrived at McCann Erickson São Paulo in 2005 before relocating for a role at Muse Amsterdam in 2007.

“Max is a smart, born storyteller with a proven track record, plus he will add his Brazilian flair to the agency, Laurence Thomson told Campaign. “We’re well chuffed we could persuade him to join McCann.”

Image: Brand Republic/Campaign

L’entreprise AirBnB a commissionné un projet d’architecture surprenant : construire une penthouse au coeur d’une station historique de saut à ski à Oslo, en Norvège. Un vrai travail de rénovation a été effectué pour réaliser cet appartement planté à une hauteur de 60 mètres, pensé dans le cadre d’un concours pour faire gagner des nuits dans ce lieu atypique.

Kickback payments tied to U.S. media-agency deals are real and on the rise, according to Ad Age interviews with more than a dozen current and former media-agency executives, marketers’ auditors, media sellers and ad-tech vendors who said they’d either participated in such arrangements or had seen evidence of them. The murky practice — sometimes disguised as (undisclosed) “rebates” or bills for bogus services — is being motivated by shrinking agency fees and fueled by an increasingly convoluted and global digital marketplace. “It’s really ugly and crooked,” said one ad-tech executive who described receiving such requests.

Some arrangements go like this: A large media shop, poised to spend $1 million with that ad-tech executive’s firm to buy digital ads last year, asked for $200,000 to be routed back to the agency’s corporate sibling in Europe. The $200,000 would pay for a presentation or presentations by the sibling’s consultants. But these types of presentations aren’t worth a fraction of the price tag, according to numerous executives dealing with the same issue, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing business.

“It’s positioned as if this affiliate is going to do ‘media planning’ or ‘media optimization,’ but they do nothing and one never hears from them again,” the ad-tech executive said. “They just receive the check.” Another vendor said the same media shop asked something similar of him.

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California-based creative agency Pitch has recruited Rob Goldenberg, former director of brand marketing at Beats Music, as executive creative director, as well as Helena Skonieczny, who joins from TBWA Media/Arts/Lab as executive design director and creative director. Goldenberg, who spent most of the last two years at Beats Music, began his career in L.A. at Secret Weapon Marketing. He worked at Bates in Singapore before becoming associate creative director at Deutsch, where he created the “Trust me, I’m a Doctor” campaign for Dr Pepper. As a freelance at TBWA/Media Arts Lab, he helped craft the “Intention” campaign for Apple, which won two Cannes Gold Lions. Skonieczny’s work includes creating the visual identity for Crate & Barrel, as well as campaigns for brands including Apple’s iPhone 5s, Target, Diet Pepsi, Gatorade and Visa. Both Goldenberg and Skonieczny will report to Xanthe Wells, Pitch’s chief creative officer.

Goodby Silverstein & Partners has tapped Eric Kallman and Margaret Johnson to lead its San Francisco creative department, as co-chairs Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein take a step back from day-to-day responsibilities. Johnson is an 18-year veteran of the agency who has created work for Hagen-Dazs, HP, Nike and Logitech. She became one of the agency’s five partners in 2012. Kallman, who moves up to executive creative director, joined Goodby in March 2014 after work at Barton F Graf 9000. He is known for his work on Skittles, Old Spice, Career Builder, Coca-Cola, Kayak, Little Caesars and Ragu. Paul Caiozzo, who joined Goodby’s New York office in May, will continue to lead the creative department there.

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