TBWAChiatDay LA Hires New CPO, Design Director

tanya_lesieurTBWA’s Los Angeles office made two hires today, and we have the press release to prove it.

For the newly-created chief production officer role, the agency hired Tanya LeSieur; she will join TBWA in late March and sit at its (metaphorical) management table along with President Luis DeAnda, Chief Creative Officer Stephen Butler, and Chief Strategy Officer Nick Barham. Perhaps most significantly, she will also “assume oversight of all agency creative output.”

LeSieur heads West from Saatchi & Saatchi New York, where she landed around the same time as (relatively) new CEO Brent Smart. Prior to that move, LeSieur served as director of integrated production at Saatchi’s LA office for four and a half years, and she is a familiar face to creative staffers at a few major agencies: she spent five years with JWT, one with McCann, and nearly a decade with GS&P before joining Saatchi in 2009. During her time in New York, she also served as a juror/panelist/thought leader for pretty much every major awards event.

A source claims that new business has been a point of contention within Saatchi’s New York office, which went through a standard creative “reshuffling” last summer.

TBWA also hired UX veteran Mark Sloan as director of design in LA. Sloan most recently held the creative director position at surf company Quiksilver, but he is not a new face within the TBWA organization: prior to joining Anomaly Amsterdam as ECD in the summer of 2012, he spent more than a year as an art director/ACD at MAL working on the iPhone 4S. He also worked on the design team at Wieden+Kennedy’s Amsterdam office.

The two will work on all of TBWA LA’s accounts, which now include such recent wins as Airbnb, Buffalo Wild Wings, and Miller Lite. Butler writes:

“Tanya and Mark are both rightfully renowned for their creative weaponry and their high regard for craft, and having them on board will give us the competitive edge that we are seeking.”

Both new hires will report to him.

Evolve Asks Gun Owners Not to Be Dumbasses

Today, Saatchi & Saatchi New York is launching the first ever campaign for the gun responsibility organization Evolve, encouraging people to take personal responsibility for gun safety and generally not be dumbasses.

Saatchi & Saatchi’s pro-bono campaign features a short, satirical video called “The Bill of Rights for Dumbasses.” The 1:40 video portrays Thomas Jefferson and other historical figures debating the language of the second amendment. Jefferson thinks the amendment runs a little long, and after much debate, convinces the rest of the council to remove the “as long as they aren’t being dumbasses about it” part from the amendment. While the founding fathers are debating the matter, viewers are treated to a humorous montage of gun owners engaging in questionable practices, before Jefferson concludes it’s common sense that you shouldn’t act that way with a gun. The video ends with the founding fathers playing pinata with a gun, followed by the tagline, “It’s the right to bear arms, not the right to be dumbass” and a message prompting viewers to go to takeonthecode.com and sign the code of gun responsibility.

Evolve co-founder Rebecca Bond hopes that “Humor can be a gateway to taking away the defensiveness that is the legacy of these discussions.” Joe Bond, also an Evovle co-founder, added, “We want the ‘Dumbass’ concept to catch on in popular culture the way ‘friends don’t let friends drive drunk’ did for safe driving.”

Since it’s rare to find people discussing guns without getting hysterical about it, Saatchi & Saatchi’s employment of dumb humor is somewhat refreshing. But will it really chip away at the defensiveness that gun rights activists feel when discussing anything related to guns? Or are they more likely to take offense at the video depicting gun owners, and even founding fathers, as dumbasses? Unfortunately, I doubt the video will convince many viewers to “take on the code,” because even though Evolve professes to be a “third voice” in the gun debate without political affiliation, gun rights activists will still likely view the video’s satire as an attack on them. Meanwhile, the video will appeal to plenty of gun reform proponents — people who don’t need any convincing on the importance of gun safety, and mostly don’t own guns (and therefore have no need to take Evolve’s pledge). That’s too bad, because Evolve’s responsibility code is really just common sense and something any gun owner should be able to get behind — which makes this feel like a missed opportunity. Credits after the jump.

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