The San Francisco agency with the unpronounceable name has promoted two and hired one within its creative department.
Readers may remember Josh Bogdan (above) from his previous role as “dude with a crayon”; the former JWT/AKQA copywriter joined MUH-TAY-ZIK in a senior position in 2012, and now he’s been promoted to creative director. Past work mentioned in the notice includes the “It’s Your Town” campaign for New Amsterdam Vodka, which earned a mention from one Stuart Elliott.
Tony Zimney (above) began working with the MUH-TAY-ZIK team as a freelancer and joined the full-time staff as ACD in 2013; since then he worked on campaigns for such clients as Annie’s Organic, maker of the storied mac and cheese.
Prior to joining the SF agency, Zimney worked as an art director at Preston Kelly, WONGDOODY, SapientNitro and others before going freelance and working with Tribal DDB, AKQA, POSSIBLE, Google’s Nest Labs, and more.
The two were promoted, at least in part, for their work on recent projects like Netflix Spoilers, which garnered a fair amount of attention from our anonymous tipsters. One such source wrote:
“Not sure if Netflix did this internally or though an agency but they are spoiling all their shows. Kind of pisses me off.”
…which was the point.
Bodgan and Zimney also helped lead creative on campaigns for dating service Zoosk, Google Chrome, and the Golden State Warriors.
In other staffing news, MUH-TAY-ZIK hired Nate Gagnon (above) as associate creative director. Gagnon — who spent nearly three years freelancing for agencies including VB&P, Argonaut, AQKA, mcgarrybowen and the now-defunct DOJO before joining the new agency — has graced these digital pages before as well:
- Gagnon earned a bit of attention in late 2012 for offering to “outsource” his copywriting talents to the Chinese ad industry; it would seem that he did some work for BBDO Shanghai at the time
- In 2013, Gagnon and fellow freelancer Stephen Hadinger created “Goodstache,” a drinking game designed to raise money for the Prostate Cancer Foundation; the site is down, but the YouTube video lives on
- He also created “Forgotify,” a site compiling the more than four million Spotify tracks that have never been played
Here’s a quote from John Matejczyk, agency co-founder and ECD who effectively serves as CCO:
“We’ve been enjoying the best kind of growth here lately, both from existing clients and a couple great new ones we’ll be able to talk about soon.
We love that we’re able to promote Josh and Tony. These guys are taking on huge challenges and continuing to give clients amazing thinking. They will be running all the Netflix business and Zoosk account, for whom they recently created the “First comes like” campaign which repositions the brand.
We’re also excited to be able to bring on Nate Gagnon as ACD. He’ll be running a new account that we’ll also be able to soon announce, with my close involvement, too.
Nate is full of innovative ideas that move brands forward in meaningful ways. He’s constantly coming up with useful ways that brands can do things for their customers across digital, experiential, and traditional approaches.”