Hasta La Creative!

MUH-TAY-ZIK | HOF-FER announced the appointment of Gary Theut as associate partner and director of account management, ending “an exhaustive search to find a qualified management candidate with an appropriately hard-to-pronounce last name.” He will be responsible for leading the account team alongside co-founders John Matejczyk, executive creative director, and Matt Hofherr, director of strategy.

Theut joins the integrated agency from Pereira & O’Dell, where he spent nearly seven years as vice president and director of account services, working with clients including Intel, LEGO, Airbnb, Beats by Dre and Corona. Prior to Pereira & O’Dell, Theut spent three years at AKQA San Francisco as a group account director., where his clients included McDonald’s, Bank of America, Sprite and Microsoft. Theut began his career at a series of traditional agencies, including JWT, The Martin Agency and Publicis Hal Riney before jumping to Lot21 Interactive in 2000.

“Gary has been on the inside of creating great campaigns for great clients at great agencies,” said Matejczyk. “And he’s a warm, personable dude. We’re fortunate that Gary has chosen to take this next step in his career, to guide the account management team at MUH-TAY-ZIK | HOF-FER and help shape the next generation of leadership here.”

Pereira & O’Dell nabbed creative duties for Airbnb in September, and three months later, the San Fran shop is launching Birdbnb, their first campaign for the global travel renting company. To supplement Airbnb’s colorful site full of rental options, Pereira & O’Dell created a conceptual platform where artists built 50 birdhouse-sized renderings of actual listings. The finished products will be on display in Audubon Park in New Orleans December 16-22.

The official name of the campaign is “Every Traveler Deserves a Home,” and the 2:10 cut of the above video feels very homey, which is probably the best compliment I can give a travel rental commercial. The 4:30 version drags a bit, kind of like that nice older lady who rents you a room but keeps talking your ear off about topics you don’t care about (2:10 version here, FYI). She’s still kind, but you want to tell her to keep it brief, since, after all, you are the customer. However, selling this type of service does not lend itself to easy choices for advertising, and this effort finds a way to tell a story that makes travel rentals personal.

Credits bookended by some behind-the-scenes videos after the jump.

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The onion alert is in full effect. Skype has been promoting their global capabilities with a “Stay Together” campaign produced by Pereira & O’Dell, and the fourth video in the series, “The Born Friends Family Portrait,” is a smart showcase of the program’s utility. Two girls, Sarah from Indiana and Paige from Auckland, were both born without fully developed left arms and formed a long distance friendship over the years. Sarah and Paige are now teenagers, and as you can see in the accompanying clip, finally met in-person. It’s touching and respectfully filmed.

The three prior videos cover similar stories – a father talking to his family still in Africa, a zookeeper in America keeping tabs on an animal family in Australia, and a two young cousins (common theme) closing the gap between Brazil and America. We should probably expect more tearjerkers from Skype, because these are the kind of tales that sell themselves. No misdirection or exploitation, just a documentary setup that has the right kind of appeal. Credits after the jump.

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