Hasta La Creative!

Back in March, we posted on chief strategy officer Rebecca Stambanis and executive creative director Jorge Calleja joining TBWAMedia Arts Lab following the departures of Marc-Antoine Jarry and Eric Grunbaum the previous month.

Now, less than six months later, both Stambanis and Calleja are no longer with the agency.

Executive director of integration Kaitlyn Wilkins, who joined TBWAMedia Arts Lab in March after overseeing strategy and integration for all brand and product marketing campaigns at Burberry London, has also left the Apple shop. A spokesperson for TBWAMedia Arts Lab confirmed the departures, but declined to comment further.

Before joining TBWAMAL, Stambansis spent over five years at W+K Portland as global group strategy director on the Nike account. That followed over two and a half years as deputy director of brand strategy at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, working with clients including Nintendo, Comcast and Haagen-Dazs.

Calleja joined TBWAMAL following several years as executive creative director at The Martin Agency, leading the agency’s Tic Tac, Stoli and Mondelez accounts. He also spent time as a creative director with Sid Lee and W+K, where he focused on the Coca-Cola business.

The quick exits of Stambansis, Calleja and Wilkins mark the latest in a series of executive departures at Media Arts Lab. In addition to Jarry and Grunbaum leaving in February, worldwide managing director Dave Dreyer and executive creative director Steve Turner both left TBWAMedia Arts Lab in April.

Multiple parties alerted us to the pending news, but we have not yet received any word as to why they left the agency or why their departures came so soon after the initial hiring news.

This morning we received confirmation from a spokesperson that Cheryl Childers, longtime Executive Director of Production with TBWA‘s Media Arts Lab, officially left the agency last week.

MAL is, of course, the famously “secretive” shop TBWA set up in 2006 to work exclusively for Apple, and Childers was a member of the core leadership team at the time of its founding. Of the four names listed in that release, two remain with MAL: ECD Eric Grunbaum and CSO Elena Hale (onetime Brand Leader Alex Moulle-Berteaux now serves as CCO at Aereo).

Childers had been with TBWA for some time before the establishment of MAL as well; her LinkedIn profile notes 23 years spent with the organization.

This move is the largest staffing change at MAL since the January appointment of president Erica Hoholick, formerly of Ogilvy London. The agency gave no details regarding the reasons for Childers’ departure or her future plans.

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In perhaps the best spot since the passing of Steve Jobs, Apple and TBWA\Media Arts Lab’s latest for the iPhone, “Photos Every Day,” somehow mixes simplicity with more visually striking images than we’ve seen from the tech giant in quite a while.

“Photos Every Day” takes us outside of Apple’s infinite environment of white space and Helvetica and into the great outdoors, which may be the first time Apple’s ever done that to my recollection. However, I’m young, so correct me if I’m wrong here. The spot highlights one of the iPhone’s greatest, if overlooked feature: its 8-megapixel HD camera. Now, in this day an age, every phone on the market is a camera-phone, as has been the case for nearly a decade now. However, the iPhone’s camera is, and probably will continue to be, a step up from every Nexus or HTC phone on the market.

This is Apple’s way of saying, “Hey, remember this thing? We have the best, and, unlike Siri, it’s actually one of our features that you’ll use constantly for just about everything.” Add to that Instagram, which began as an iPhone exclusive and still works best with iOS, and you have yourself some simple, yet beautiful. Credits after the jump.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.