Karin Onsager-Birch Joins FCB West as CCO

369c1b7FCB has named Karin Onsager-Birch as chief creative officer of the agency’s San Francisco and Los Angeles offices, collectively known as FCB West, AdAge reports. She fills a role left vacant since the departure of Eric Springer last September. The appointment follows the selection of Eric Cosper as chief creative officer of FCB Garfinkel in New York a little over a week ago.

Onsager-Birch joins FCB from Blue Hive in London, where she worked on the WPP agency’s Ford account. She arrived at Blue Hive in May of 2012, serving initially as executive creative director before being named chief creative officer last year. Prior to that, she spent 11 years with Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, arriving in 2001 as a creative director and senior art director, before becoming an associate creative director in 2004. While with GS&P, Onsager-Birch worked on accounts including Chevrolet, Hyundai, Nintendo and Hewlett Packard.

When asked of the appointment, FCB West CEO Dominic Whittles told AdAge that Onsanger-Birch was chosen because her “leadership style is substantive and direct, she’s open minded and solution-oriented, she’s clear about her point of view and very forthright,” adding that her international experience “allows her to draw on a much larger source code of information.”

BBDO NY Crafts Flights of Fancy for GE’s ‘Childlike Imagination’

If you’ve been watching the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics at all, chances are you’ve seen the above spot for GE by BBDO New York.

The 60 second spot, “Childlike Imagination,” portrays GE’s range of individual businesses (turbines, aviation, 3-D printing, and others) through the imagination of the daughter of a GE employee. Its artful approach marks a departure from previous GE campaigns, which tended to focus on just one of these businesses. This change of approach works well for GE. The girl imagines “underwater fans that are powered by the moon,” “airplane engines that can talk,” “hospitals you can hold in your hand,” and “trains that are friends with trees.” The imaginative concept makes for a fun, visually interesting effort designed to capture your attention. Stick around for credits after the jump. continued…

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GE Goes ‘Back to the Future’ for New Ad That Will Spawn Dozens of Similar Headlines

It seems like there’s an awful lot of Back to the Future nostalgia invading the Internet these days, with posts about the series on sites like Reddit leading to listicles about the trilogy on nostalgia-aggregators like Buzzfeed which then go viral on Facebook and eventually find themselves on large emails your mom sends to her friends and CC’s you on for some reason. And, what with it being 2013 and all,  where advertising campaigns are becoming increasingly informed by memes, we get GE and BBDO NY using the “1.21 gigawatts” thing to sell you technology or something. Where we’re going, we don’t need roads to perdition; we just fly there through space and time.

And yet, nostalgia has a way of endearing you to things in a way totally out of your control. Call it manipulation, call it “effective advertising” using one of the oldest tricks in the book. Any way or slice it, it’s hard as even a casual fan of the series not to get a little giddy when you see what are ostensibly Marty McFly’s Nikes pop out of a souped-up Delorean. While Pepperidge Farm dares us to remember a time when people died of dystentary and snakebites like in Oregon TrailBack to the Future‘s original audience has aged to the point where brands see the 1980s as a way to get consumers on board 30-something years later.

In fact, I hope this becomes a whole campaign where GE powers David Bowie‘s castle from LabyrinthE.T.‘s glowing finger, and the computer from Weird Science. And, though it wouldn’t make much sense, maybe Michael J. Fox could narrate those spots too. Maybe in another 30 years, GE will power the ships from Avatar and Robin Thicke can provide us with his own deep-voiced VO. Trust me, it will make sense by then. Credits after the jump.

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BBDO NY Resurrects Agent Smith for Latest GE Effort

Has it really been ten years since The Matrix: Revolutions tarnished the Wachowskis’epic saga? Time flies, but while we’d rather forget the third and final Matrix installment, we’re happy to once again see Hugo Weaving as the relentless Agent Smith, whose dapper yet menacing visage appears along with several doppelgangers in this latest effort from BBDO New York for GE called “Agent of Good.”

The spot, which was directed by David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express), debuted over the weekend and showcases GE’s industrial internet technology and how the corporate giant connecting its medical hardware to its software is benefiting hospitals–or something to that effect. Despite being a decade removed from the Matrix films, Weaving shows no signs of rust as he brings the snarl of his most iconic character to the most sterile of environments. Stick around for the final moments for your most obvious Matrix reference, minus Morpheus. Credits after the jump.

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