Hasta La Creative!

Goodby Silverstein & Partners expanded its creative and tech teams with the arrival of copywriter Theo Bayani (pictured left) and art director Miguel Gonzalez (pictured right), and creative technologist Troy Lumpkin (below). 

A creative team, Bayani and Gonzalez join GS&P from Grey London. They joined Grey from DLKW Lowe in August of 2013 as senior creatives and led work on the agency’s HSBC Bank and Vodafone Ireland accounts, including working on the Cannes Lion-winning “Lift” for HSBC in 2015. Before joining Grey they spent nearly two years with DLKW Lowe, where they worked on Unilever’s Persil brand. Prior to that, Gonzalez spent over four and a half years with DDB London and Bayani spent five years with TBWALondon. 

Lumpkin joins GS&P from Google Creative Lab, where he has spent the past six months, following nearly three and a half years as partner, creative director for NSG SWAT. At GS&P, he will be tasked with overseeing an internal hacker group working on client-related projects and developing new tools and products. 

“We are so excited to welcome more award-winning talent like Theo and Miguel,” GS&P partner and chief creative officer Margaret Johnson said in a statement. “With Troy also joining us, I look forward to continuing our culture of in-house innovation, which has always been signature to GS&P.”

Heineken USA imports Tecate from Mexico — and now the brand’s ad ideas will come from south of the border, too.

The marketer has shifted U.S. creative duties on Tecate to a Mexican-based agency, spelling the end of the beer marketer’s relationship with Saatchi & Saatchi New York. The brew’s new shop is Nomades, which was founded in Mexico and Argentina in 2013 by Pablo Batlle, an Argentine creative and DDB veteran. A Heineken USA spokesman confirmed the agency would handle Tecate from its Mexico City office.

It is unusual for a U.S.-sold brand to be led from an ad agency office outside of the states — but one that the Mexican imported brew has tried before. Tecate in 2012 handed U.S. ad responsibilities to Mexico City-based Olabuenaga Chemistri, which at the time had been handling the brew’s Mexican advertising. But the experiment ended 14 months later when Heineken moved the account back to the U.S., tapping Inspire, Dallas, to oversee English-language campaigns. (The Olabuenaga Chemistri agency no longer exists, following a merger with Leo Burnett in Mexico in April 2015 after Ana Maria Olabuenaga retired from the agency she founded.)

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Every weekday, we bring you the Ad Age/iSpot Hot Spots, new and trending TV commercials tracked by iSpot.tv, the real-time TV ad measurement company with attention analytics from 10 million smart TVs. The New Releases here ran on TV for the first time yesterday. The Most Engaging ads are ranked by digital activity (including online views and social shares) over the past week.

Among the new releases, Samsung serves up a bunch of sexy motion graphics and action-packed clips (colliding football players! speeding sports cars!) to sell its QLED TV as “The Next Innovation in TV.” Dodge has another teaser for the 2018 Challenger SRT Demon — and the ad campaign for it. (Spoiler: the Demon will have something called “drag mode” that has nothing to do with Ru Paul.) And against all odds, Taco Bell overcomes the friendzone to bring the taco and the burrito together.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

The New York office of MullenLowe recently won a review to become global creative agency of record for Mount Gay Rum. Moving forward, it will be handling all campaigns to promote the Barbados-based, Rémy Cointreau-owned liquor brand.

In recent years, Ogilvy and New York’s Our Man in Havana have produced work for the brand, which can legitimately claim to be the world’s oldest active rum facility (but not one of the 10 biggest selling brands, according to various listicles).

The account is somewhat minor. According to Kantar Media, Remy spent less than $200,000 on measured media promoting Mount Gay in the U.S. in 2015.

But the parent company wants to expand its rum’s share of the market compared to big . In 2013, production company Radical Media discussed rebranding Mount Gay at The One Show’s Creative Week, noting that they aimed to “position the brand in a more premium space.”

Reps for MullenLowe and Rémy Cointreau declined to comment on the relationship.

According to the party who first shared the win with us, it symbolizes MullenLowe New York’s newfound ability to “compete and win against all the big boys” thanks to its new management.

We’ve yet to find a party who will confirm that—but we are pretty sure the phrase “big digital transformation assignment from a high end retail/e-comm player” refers to MullenLowe beating out several hot shops to win E*Trade earlier this month.

[Pic via]

If you’re introducing a female condom to U.S. consumers for the first time, you’d better address the elephant in the room: How does this weird-looking thing even work? Leave it to Amanda Burch, a senior advertising copywriter turned on-air talent, to demonstrate and explain, via naked hula hooping, references to petite pink canoes and reverse…

(TrendHunter.com) As the April 2017 interactive trends reveal, brands are eager to create immersive experiences around their products instead of relying on more traditional forms of advertising.

One way in which…

Translation launched a new ad for healthcare provider Kaiser Permanente starring Golden State Warriors point guard Stephen Curry.

The spot focuses on mental health and the stresses of being a professional athlete. At the opening of the spot Curry hearsskeptics deliver lines like “He’s not one of the greats yet” in his head.

NBA stars overcoming doubters on the way to their goals is nothing new for advertising, but this isn’t another spot for cars or sneakers. Rather, Curry is showing that even NBA players have to find ways to deal with stress and anxiety and the importance of mental health on behalf of Kaiser Permanente. His means of finding calm is something of an unusual one: a dip in a flotation tank.

That approach allows for a visually intriguing ad, in which Curry visualizes his mental stresses and overcomes them. While it may be hard for viewers to understand the stresses of succeeding in the NBA, the correlation to dealing with everyday stress and anxiety, and the message of the importance of paying attention to mental health, still comes across, summed up in the vaguely George Clinton-esque tagline, “Train the mind. The body will follow.”

“We’re moving from being more inspirational around telling people to thrive, to acknowledging that thriving is hard and difficult,” Lawrence Montgomery, Kaiser Permanente senior director of national advertising explained to AdAge. “That’s what you see in Stephen. For the everyday man and woman, being able to relate to that, we think, is powerful.”

Nothing says investment management like a bunch of acrobats flying through the air with the greatest of ease. Right? Judge for yourselves from the circus atmosphere in the spot below, created for T. Rowe Price by The VIA Agency. You’ll see some impressive moves, the conceit being that careful adjustments drive the aerial ballet, much…