Publicis Seattle has hired Jason Tarantino as EVP, executive strategy director. He will work on Publicis Seattle’s T-Mobile business and report directly to EVP, managing partner Melissa Nelson.
In this new role for the agency, Tarantino will be responsible for directing strategy for the T-Mobile business, leading a team of seven strategy executives to identify and execute on the best decisions for the brand.
Tarantino’s addition to the T-Mobile team comes as Publicis Seattle is bolstering its senior leadership on the business by adding a number of new strategy executives. Most recently, Publicis Seattle welcomed Lisa Baldini as communications strategy director, who will work closely with Tarantino.
Before joining Publicis Seattle, Tarantino served as VP, planning director at RPA where he handled traditional, digital, social, and content strategy for Intuit’s QuickBooks and Apartments.com. Other agency experience includes stints at R/GA and Wieden+Kennedy, where he worked across a number of accounts, including Verizon, Levi’s, Electronic Arts and Target.
Tarantino has been honored with a number of awards including a Clio for working on Electronic Arts’ “Dante’s Inferno,” a Jay Chiat Award for Research Innovation for his work on Nike ID, and both a Cannes Silver Lion and Webby for his work with Verizon while at R/GA.
Before working in the advertising industry, Tarantino was commissioned by MIT to develop and direct an interactive theater piece that played across the Gertrude Stein Repertory Theater, MIT’s List Center for the Visual Arts and the internet using experimental technology developed by Bell Labs.
Review: Writer-Director Aaron Schimberg’s “A Different Man”
Imagine you could wake up one morning, stand at the mirror, and literally peel off any part of your looks you don't like — with only movie-star beauty remaining.
How would it change your life? How SHOULD it change your life?
That's a question – well, a launching point, really — for Edward, protagonist of Aaron Schimberg's fascinating, genre-bending, undeniably provocative and occasionally frustrating "A Different Man," featuring a stellar trio of Sebastian Stan, Adam Pearson and Renate Reinsve.
The very title is open to multiple interpretations. Who (and what) is "different"? The original Edward, who has neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder that causes bulging tumors on his face? Or the man he becomes when he's able to slip out of that skin? And is he "different" to others, or to himself?
When we meet Edward, a struggling actor in New York (Stan, in elaborate makeup), he's filming some sort of commercial. We soon learn it's an instructional video on how to behave around colleagues with deformities. But even there, the director stops him, offering changes. "Wouldn't want to scare anyone," he says.
On Edward's way home on the subway, people stare. Back at his small apartment building, he meets a young woman in the hallway, in the midst of moving to the flat next door. She winces visibly when she first sees him, as virtually everyone does.
But later, Ingrid (Reinsve) tries to make it up to him, coming over to chat. She is charming and forthright, and tells Edward she's a budding playwright.
Edward goes for a medical checkup and learns that one of his tumors is slowly progressing over the eye. But he's also told of an experimental trial he could join. With the possibility — maybe — of a cure.
So... Read More