David&Goliath has hired former CP+B Miami executive creative director Gustavo Sarkis to lead creative on the Kia business moving forward. The Drum broke the news this morning.
This means that managing partner and chief creative officer Colin Jeffrey will no longer be top creative on that particular account. He will, however, continue overseeing the department and handling D&G’s other clients.
CP+B hired Sarkis to lead its Miami creative department last January after he spent almost four years at TBWA\Chiat\Day L.A. (The latter shop recruited him and fellow Brazilian Almap BBDO vet Renato Fernandez to run the Gatorade account in 2011, and Fernandez was just promoted to global ECD at TBWA after working on the Derek Jeter goodbye spot and other prominent campaigns.)
Jay Gelardi, a veteran of Sydney, Australia agency The Monkeys who joined CP+B Boulder as a digital ECD in 2014 and moved to Miami one year ago, will lead the office; Crispin does not appear to be seeking a replacement for Sarkis.
The fact that Jeffrey will no longer lead the Kia business is significant because the car brand remains D&G’s largest client, and he drove creative on the account since joining D&G in 2006. (The agency’s most recent Kia work, in case you missed it, was a cinematic spot featuring those signature hamsters jamming out to an extended version of “Dueling Banjos.”)
The Drum reports that Sarkis will begin his new role at D&G on September 1st. He told the blog, “It’s going to be quite a challenge to keep pushing the work forward,” adding that he’s excited to work for an indie agency for the first time due to its lack of a traditional holding company shop’s trademark bureaucracy.
We hear that Sarkis wanted to return to L.A. to be closer to his family, though CP+B and D&G declined to comment on the news beyond the Drum release.