Hasta La Creative!

Santa Monica-based agency RED Interactive promoted Derek van den Bosch to the role of chief operating officer.

Derek has spent nearly three years serving as vice president, operations and delivery, during which time he helped strengthen the agency’s strategic and delivery capabilities. Before joining RED Interactive, he spent nearly eight years with TBWAChiatDay. He originally joined TBWA as an executive producer in September of 2002 and held the position for over six and a half years before being promoted to director, digital production in April of 2009. Prior to that, he spent time as a project manager with Razorfish and briefly served as a producer with W+K Amsterdam. 

“Derek’s contributions have helped shaped RED into what it has become today – a highly functioning powerhouse of strategy, creativity and innovation. We couldn’t be prouder to name him COO,” said RED Interactive president Donny Makower.

Ramberg joins RED Interactive from Evans Hunt, where he spent over a year serving as managing director, following around a year and a half as vice president, client services at Huge. Prior to Huge he spent around eight and a half years at Critical Mass. He arrived at Critical Mass New York as vice president, managing director in late 2004, before transitioning to vice president, client services at Critical Mass Calgary in August of 2007 and overseeing the opening of Critical Mass Los Angeles while serving as vice president three years later.

“Taro brings exceptional thinking and experience to the head of client-services role,” said CEO Brian Lovell. “He’s completely aligned with our focus on building long-term relationships with clients, providing a great experience and delivering amazing work.”

The Financial Times is certainly not the first media company to test out approaches to combating the rise of ad-blocking technology, but its new approach might be the most creative one yet.

On Wednesday, the newspaper began blanking out, for some users, a percentage of words in articles symbolizing the percentage of the company’s revenue that comes from advertising.

The proportion of words blocked isn’t scientific, and the Financial Times doesn’t break out the exact chunk of revenue that comes from ads, said global advertising sales director Dominic Good. “It’s more illustrative than specific,” he said.

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Reliable sources tell us this week that the New York offices of TBWAChiatDay recently won a creative review for work related to the Pepsi brand.

PepsiCo did not announce this review, but the company has made some recent changes to its agency lineup. Last September, former AOR BBDO rekindled its relationship with the main Pepsi brand by way of a spot starring unlikely spokesperson and Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch. This was BBDO’s first work for the parent brand in 7 years since TBWA won lead creative duties in a 2008 review, and it arrived before the agency won Tropicana.

Last month, Pepsi also named VML as the new AOR for its Brisk Tea line, which had previously been with The Barbarian Group. (As we understand it, the latter agency will continue to play some role on the Brisk account for the immediate future.) In May, the soft drink giant announced the opening of its own “state of the art content studio” in Manhattan.

A TBWA spokesperson declined to comment for this post, and PepsiCo’s PR department has not responded to multiple email queries and phone calls this week.

For that reason, the scope of the TBWA win and the nature of the work it will eventually produce is not clear at this time. But we did learn of the win from a party with direct knowledge of the matter. We also hear that Erik Vervroegen, the former Publicis Groupe international CCO who became global head of art for the TBWA network last month, has begun hiring creatives to work on the Pepsi business. Vervroegen and former TBWA South Africa colleague/current global creative president Chris Garbutt will supposedly collaborate on the account and related staffing efforts in the New York office.

Pepsi’s recent advertising efforts for its main brand have been nostalgic: The company brought Crystal Pepsi back from the dead with Barbarian Group’s help last year. It also revisited the classic 1992 BBDO Cindy Crawford ad in a recent Millennial reboot and ran some emoji-focused spots earlier this year with the help of its various global agency partners.

(TrendHunter.com) Though only a concept, the BMW Titan can turn heads even in composite drawings. The aggressively canted high-speed motorcycle design, if adapted into a physical vehicle based on designer Mehmet…

When Jos Moll left Wieden & Kennedy to start his own shop, he asked Dan Wieden, “How did you do it?” “He said, ‘I have no fucking idea. I guess if you follow your guts shit happens man,'” relayed Mr. Moll, kicking off Ad Age’s Small Agency Conference in Miami on Wednesday.

“For me, it was the best advice someone ever gave me,” he said. “It freed me. You don’t need a detailed plan.”

That doesn’t mean it was easy when Argentine brothers Jos and Joaqun Moll founded La Communidad 15 years ago.

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Gen X has more spending power than any other generation, representing 31% of total U.S. income while only making up a quarter of the population, research shows. But despite the numbers, marketers have vastly overlooked this audience of 35- to 50-year-olds, a phenomenon that Sparks & Honey explores in its latest culture trend report.

The report, “Gen X at 50,” which includes a mix of proprietary and secondary research and insights from the Omnicom Agency’s social listening tools, reveals that Gen X-ers are an important target for marketers for a number of reasons, such as their buying power and ability to reach Gen Z and younger millennials.

Sean Mahoney, VP-editorial director at Sparks & Honey, said all eyes are on millennials and boomers, and no one is paying attention to Gen X. “They’re actually the people in power — power of the purse, they’re running households, they’re moving into political power, they’re in the center of everything and when you think of that from a marketing or advertising perspective, you want to reach the people who have influence, not only over themselves, but over other people,” he said.

Continue reading at AdAge.com