Chandelier Creative announced today it has retained 15-year industry veteran Eric Druckenmiller as head of strategy to help the agency “shorten the period from concept to execution.”
Druckenmiller most recently provided strategic planning and led re-staging assignments, innovation projects and larger cross-platform client initiatives for brands including Budweiser, Converse and Google via his own agency, Knight and Knave.
His appointment marks a reunion of sorts. As an independent contractor, Druckenmiller consulted Vice Media on primarily new business pitches from 2014 to 2015, where he met Dave Clark, who is now Chandelier’s executive creative director. Clark and Druckenmiller worked together on consulting Vice during that time.
“We’re so excited to welcome Eric Druckenmiller to the Chandelier family,” Clark said in a statement, “we’ve collaborated frequently” since Vice, “and I’m constantly impressed with his strategic mind and the deep insights he brings to his work.”
Since he got his start in the industry in the late 1990s, Druckenmiller has held stints at various renowned agencies including Publicis, Anomaly, PHD Media Worldwide, DDB Worldwide and Deep Focus (where he helped launch its media department). At those agencies, Druckenmiller worked on accounts such as HBO, Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola.
In his new role, Druckenmiller said in a statement that he aims to “tear down this wall” between strategy and creative.
“I see my role as infusing strategic thinking into the DNA of the agency,” he explained. “I think strategic thinking has been too far relegated to a walled-off discipline in this business, and I want ‘strategy’ to be seen differently at Chandelier.”
Druckenmiller doesn’t see himself as “an add-on or a nice-to have at the end of the road to tie things up in a bow,” he added, “more than ever strategic thinking has to be embedded into any successful model for change and self-disruption.”