Wieden+Kennedy New York, which recently reshuffled its creative team by saying goodbye to two ECDs and promoting Portland’s Kyle Lieberman, has named its new strategy lead.
Dan Hill heads stateside after spending three years in the head of planning role at London’s Karmarama, and he replaces Erik Hanson, who left over the summer to become director of marketing communications at a fruit-oriented tech company based in Cupertino, California.
Since Hanson’s departure, managing director Neal Arthur had been overseeing strategy in Manhattan.
Hill started his agency career as a planner at JWT London, and he’s not new to the Wieden organization: from 2008 to 2011 he was a global planning director on the Nike football account at W+K Amsterdam, where he worked on the award-winning 2010 World Cup campaign “Write the Future” and played lead on projects for ESPN, Coca-Cola, EA Games and more. After leaving Wieden, he led the global Nike business at AKQA in London and later moved to Karmarama; accounts there included BBC, Unilever, Honda and Air New Zealand.
He also spent three years teaching other aspiring planners as co-chair of the IPA’s Excellence in Strategic Planning training course.
In his new role, Hill will report directly to Arthur, who calls him “a smart and forward-looking strategist with a talent for solving problems and identifying business and communications opportunities,” adding, “he knows the level of ambition and standards that guide W+K—he’s already part of the family.”
In the release, Hill says he left London because “the opportunity to start a new [W+K adventure] in New York was simply too good to pass up,” citing the shop’s “rare combination of confidence and restlessness which creates the best type of pressure.”
His first day on the new job will be November 9.