Hasta La Creative!

Full-service Chicago-based independent agency Laughlin Constable hired Dan Fietsam as chief creative officer, effective June 1.

Fietsam joins the agency after leaving his position as executive vice president/executive creative director with FCB Chicago last November.

Since then he led his own creative consultancy, The Fietsam Group, as well as teaching in the graduate program at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Communications. He originally joined FCB Chicago in July of 2014 and worked with such key clients as ABInBev, Boeing, Joe Boxer and Valspar after serving as CCO with Energy BBDO for over five and a half years and leading creative on accounts including Anheuser-Busch, Wrigley, Bayer, SC Johnson, Frito-Lay, Quaker, Pearle Vision and King’s Hawaiian.

He began his career as a junior copywriter with Ogilvy & Mather in 1988 and has held creative positions at Leo Burnett, Y&R, DDB and Publicis Seattle, where he led work on T-Mobile, Washington’s Lottery, RealNetworks and Coinstar.

“We are on a mission to constantly reinvent and push both ourselves and our clients. Dan is the perfect partner to help us deliver on that promise, as he is one of the most recognized and admired creative leaders in the industry,” said Laughlin Constable CEO Mat Lignel. “As importantly, he shares our entrepreneurial DNA and ambition to become one of the most successful independent agencies in the country.”

“I believe we as an industry are moving beyond advertising and more into creative marketing, whatever form that may take,” added Fietsam.

“I was already leaning into a more fluid and entrepreneurial model when I began talking with Mat about the possibility of working together. Being a part of the right team is critical to me. I was drawn to the leadership team and the people that Mat and Steve Laughlin have recruited to the agency.”

Airplane! director David Zucker is taking his second stab at tourism advertising for his home state of Wisconsin. And after a rather lackluster first effort, this time he's brought in reinforcements—in the form of actor Robert Hays, who played the lead role of Ted Striker in the iconically silly 1980 comedy. This new spot, from Laughlin Constable in Milwaukee, is certainly more entertaining than the orchestra snowball fight from last winter. It shows Hays fishing off a Wisconsin dock when all of a sudden things take a turn for the worse in exponentially slapstick fashion.

The comedy is as broad as it gets. Hays's voiceover yells and grunts are so cartoony as to be borderline insufferable. (The classy Michigan tourism campaign will certainly turn its nose up at this stuff.) But at least the spot goes for broke. What it's actually trying to say is another matter. Come to Wisconsin, where awful things can happen to you?

Zucker and Hays are planning to film another spot in which Hays will return to the cockpit for a flyover of the state. "Wisconsin is home and having a chance to give back by helping support Wisconsin's tourism effort and reunite with old friends such as Bob [Hays] has been a blast," Zucker said. "After 30 years, Bob's comic timing is still dead on, and he's even agreed to let me put him in a plane again. I just hope that he has overcome his fear of flying by now." Hays added: "The memories of the war still haunt me, but David has promised me a great co-pilot, so that should ease my fears."