Heat welcomed Evan Slater as an executive creative director heading up the creative department of the New York office it launched last May, several months after the San Francisco-based agency was acquired by Deloitte Digital.
Slater will partner with general manager, chief strategy officer Tim Maleeny and founders Steve Stone and John Elder to build up the office as a combination of Heat’s creative culture and Deloitte’s global consulting capabilities.
Slater joins Heat from SoHo’s Night Agency, where he has served as partner, executive creative director since April of 2013 and worked with clients including A-B InBev, GE, Spotify and Purina. Before that he spent nearly four years with Ogilvy & Mather New York. After joining the agency as a planning director in October of 2009, he made the switch to associate creative director the following August and was promoted to creative director in March of 2012. While with Ogilvy & Mather he worked on the “Small Business Saturday” campaign for American Express and helped bring in new clients Coca-Cola and Ikea.
“We all know the industry is in desperate need of a new model,” Slater said in a statement, “but with all the rampant conversations about the need for evolution, nobody seems to have really cracked, or committed to, a new model. Which is what this whole endeavor is about.”
“There is incredible power in taking the raw creative talent that is so pervasive in our industry, then working with Deloitte to truly amplify it,” he added. “It means we are not just making ads – we are able to creatively solve business problems and identify new opportunities. We have got the chops to be creative wherever we are needed – not just between the breaks.”