Former Team One executive Grace Teng has joined Zambezi as executive director, media & analytics, a new position at the independent creative agency. Teng’s hire adds communications strategy, media planning and buying capabilities to the shop’s expanding tool kit. Teng reports directly to CEO Jean Freeman and will work across all creative, strategic and production disciplines at the agency.
Teng’s prolific career and expertise in media, digital marketing and analytics has spanned key positions at many leading agencies: Team One (Saatchi & Saatchi), Mindshare, MECi Interactive, Deutsch LA, and BBDO. She has worked with top brands such as Goldman Sachs, Lexus, Ritz Carlton, Mitsubishi, Chrysler, KFC, Starbucks, Kraft, Sony Entertainment, Sprint and Disney. Her eclectic resume includes political marketing experience in Washington D.C. and tech startup experience in New York City as well as a stint at the venture capital firm Cerberus Capital Management.
“I will be giving more structure to the Zambezi teams as they explore how brand messaging is distributed, received and measured,” said Teng. “Basically helping everyone see the work here through an outcome-based lens. The best thing about being at Zambezi right now, a leading female-led independent, is that the timing is so right for this type of thinking. The agency has so much runway to engage.”
Review: Writer-Director Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance”
In its first two hours, "The Substance" is a well-made, entertaining movie. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat treats audiences to a heavy dose of biting social commentary on ageism and sexism in Hollywood, with a spoonful of sugar- and sparkle-doused body horror.
But the film's deliciously unhinged, blood-soaked and inevitably polarizing third act is what makes it unforgettable.
What begins as a dread-inducing but still relatively palatable sci-fi flick spirals deeper into absurdism and violence, eventually erupting — quite literally — into a full-blown monster movie. Let the viewer decide who the monster is.
Fargeat — who won best screenplay at this year's Cannes Film Festival — has been vocal about her reverence for "The Fly" director David Cronenberg, and fans of the godfather of body horror will see his unmistakable influence. But "The Substance" is also wholly unique and benefits from Fargeat's perspective, which, according to the French filmmaker, has involved extensive grappling with her own relationship to her body and society's scrutiny.
"The Substance" tells the story of Elisabeth Sparkle, a famed aerobics instructor with a televised show, played by a powerfully vulnerable Demi Moore. Sparkle is fired on her 50th birthday by a ruthless executive — a perfectly cast Dennis Quaid, who nails sleazy and gross.
Feeling rejected by a town that once loved her and despairing over her bygone star power, Sparkle learns from a handsome young nurse about a black-market drug that promises to create a "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of its user. Though she initially tosses the phone number in the trash, she soon fishes it out in a desperate panic and places an order.
The one rule to follow is that... Read More