Strategy veteran David Gonzales has joined the world’s most phonetically distinct agency, MUH-TAY-ZIK|HOF-FER, as director of strategy at its offices in San Francisco.
Gonzales will now serve as the leader of its strategy team, effective immediately. Agency co-founder Matt Hofherr previously played a central role in the strategic side of agency operations, but Gonzales is the first person to officially hold the director title.
The shop’s new strategy lead arrives fresh from a stint in Menlo Park working at Facebook’s internal agency “The Factory,” which sounds intimidating but almost certainly involves at least one very fun slide. He previously spent nearly three years as group strategy director at Droga5 in New York, where he led teams working on the Toyota Scion and Motorola accounts. (The latter went to Ogilvy & Mather in May when Droga5 resigned the business after 4 years.)
While at Droga5, Gonzales also led the successful pitch for Toyota’s hydrogen fuel cell car Mirai and helped develop the subsequent “Fueled by Everything” campaign. Previous agency roles include strategic planner at Venables Bell & Partners and TBWA\Media Arts Lab, where he worked on the Audi and Apple accounts, respectively. Before joining Team Droga, he spent just over a year as senior strategic planner on Deutsch’s HTC and Zillow business.
“To say they take strategy seriously is putting it lightly,” Gonzales says in regard to the decision to move to MUH-TAY-ZIK. “Strategy doesn’t just have a seat at the table. It literally has it’s name on the door. And the team in place couldn’t be stronger. I’m pretty sure I stumbled upon the most fundamentally decent group of people in the industry and couldn’t be happier.”
He also notes his in pursuing more high-minded goals for clients: “Purpose is the good fight, the joyful work,” he says. “When we can help brands solve that, everything else tends to fall into place.”