Hasta La Creative!

Y&R followed up on last week’s changes in its Chicago team by adding a new name to the top of its Manhattan-based creative department: Leslie Sims will be CCO at Y&R New York beginning next month.

Sims joins Y&R from the McCann organization, where she spent more than 15 years.

This marks the latest executive move for the Young & Rubicam organization, which promoted former EVP/Global Creative Director Jim Radosevic to president of Y&R New York and named General Manager Sean Howard as leader of its North American operations back in May. Last week brought news that Chicago CCO Bill Cimino would be leaving the agency and that CDs  Jeremy Smallwood and Pam Mufson would share the ECD role moving forward. That move also saw the promotion of Global Talent Coordinator Alexis Gianoulis; she replaces outgoing Director of Creative Talent Michele Daly, who is now with Saatchi & Saatchi New York.

The agency made recent changes outside its creative department as well, hiring media planner Dick de Lange — who previously ran Nike at R/GA — in September.

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Including a narrative is usually a good way for a commercial to hook the audience with creativity, but this Y&R Midwest zombie spot for Sears actually overdoes the narrative focus to the point where the  brand association is almost negligible. We know, zombies are popular, but it seems like the creatives put more time into the character development of the actors than organically integrating the product. Somebody really enjoys The Walking Dead.

The setup: a girl and a guy running from zombies try to escape in separate cars. The guy’s car won’t start, but the girl’s car has a Diehard battery that is still kicking even after the apocalypse, which is conceptually clever. But, the 70-second running time is too long for the two-second insert shot of a Diehard battery at the very end. If the first 35 seconds of the ad were cut, the relevant story points would still be in tact. There’s also a #SurviveZombies for brand engagement, but if you want or need a reliable car battery, you probably don’t care about hashtags or zombies. Credits after jump.

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