An agency rep confirmed today that Craig Mangan, the GS&P veteran who led the BBDO San Francisco creative department for the past three years, has left the agency.
Not only is he gone–he’s already been replaced by two more recent Bay Area transplants: ECDs Matt Miller and Steve Rutter.
Prior to joining BBDO in the summer of 2012, Mangan spent a whopping 17 years with the Goodby organization, rising from account manager to copywriter and ACD. When BBDO hired him almost exactly three years ago, then Chairman/current President and CEO Jim Lesser wrote:
“He’s worked on a huge range of accounts from fast food to telecom to the NBA and won every award there is to win.”
Mangan replaced Mike McKay, who is currently CCO/partner at San Francisco’s Eleven, Inc. At the time, he recorded a GS&P”exit interview” clip in which he impersonated Jeff Goodby, but it has unfortunately been removed from YouTube due to that old reliable, “multiple third-party notifications of copyright infringement.”
Rutter has spent even more time with BBDO than Mangan spent with Goodby; just over a year ago, a source confirmed that he would move to the San Francisco office from New York in order to co-lead creative on the still-new Wells Fargo account. Miller joined around the same time to do the same job after spending several years at Leo Burnett Chicago, where he worked on the “Mayhem” campaign for Allstate. Kevin Thomson, previously with The Martin Agency, also joined BBDO SF last July as part of what one contact described as a “resurgence” driven largely by the Wells Fargo win.
We can’t say where Mangan is going, exactly, though a tipster tells us that his next venture is “a personal startup” of some kind.