Hasta La Creative!

Ogilvy New York picked the Friday before the Super Bowl to announce the promotion Corinna Falusi, formerly ECD and senior partner, to the chief creative officer position.

Only nine months ago, Falusi was promoted from GCD to ECD in a move that also saw Michael Paterson become GCD and senior partner; this latest announcement marks the first executive change made by Chris Garbutt since he assumed the CCO role at Ogilvy East last February.

Falusi replaces Calle Sjoenell, who left Ogilvy back in August to return to his native Sweden…and a position at Lowe.

The new CCO, who joined Ogilvy in 2012 after nearly ten years with StrawberryFrog in both Amsterdam and New York, ran creative on Coca-Cola, IKEA, Fanta, Spotify and, most recently, Coke Zero. She will continue to lead the first two accounts while “driv[ing] the creative vision of the New York agency.”

Falusi will report to Garbutt, who calls her “an obvious choice” for the role, while working closely with New York President Adam Tucker.

NASCAR signed Ogilvy as its creative AOR back in Summer 2012 in an attempt to expand the league’s appeal and win younger fans.

As the current Sprint Cup series approaches its November finish line, the league and its agency are working to increase the hype. Most recently, Ogilvy debuted “The Chase”, a campaign designed to promote a new Westeros-style race format that casts the 16 finalists as individual nations competing against each other. (The campaign was one of the last with credits headed by now-former CCO Calle Sjoenell.)

Yesterday we received several tips about ways in which the Ogilvy New York office is celebrating the event: one tipster writes that the reception area is “decked out with flags of the 16 nations of NASCAR drivers” while another (who may well be the same person) claims that someone at Ogilvy has been “handing out moonshine on behalf of [the new campaign].”

The agency also wants its employees to participate in the UGC version of the “battle” by creating profiles and registering as members of the Ogilvy Nation.

While we regret missing the “battle of nations” deadline and the moonshine (if it did indeed exist), we do have an internal email from president Adam Tucker after the jump.

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Leo Burnett Change has launched a new campaign for the charity Business in the Community, highlighting the difficulties and discrimination ex-offenders face on the job market for the “Ban the Box” project. “Ban the Box,” is a project “calling on UK employers to remove the default criminal-record disclosure tick box from job application forms.” To call attention to this issue, Leo Burnett Chance took an innovative and thought-provoking approach to express the prejudice faced by ex-offenders on the job market.

The interactive spot “Second Chance” (after the jump), directed by Dougal Wilson, puts the viewer in the position of an employer interviewing an ex-offender. Just after the potential employee reveals that he was released from prison six months ago, the “skip ad” button appears. But this isn’t to skip through the rest of the video. The employee in this case is the ad. Leo Burnett equates the hasty discrimination many employers apply to ex-offenders interviewing for a job with viewers hastily pressing the “skip ad” button to get to their desired content. This is where the video gets interactive. If the viewer presses the “skip ad” button he or she is brought back to the video, this time with a more dejected, less articulate ex-offender. This can go on for several clicks of the “skip ad” button until the job applicant becomes fully dejected and says “I’m sorry that you didn’t want to listen. I hope you can find time in the future to give an ex-offender like me a second chance.” If the viewer does not press the skip ad button, the ex-offender becomes more confident and articulate as the video progresses, eventually expressing gratitude to the viewer for listening to him.

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