Wieden+Kennedy has appointed Ana and Hermeti Balarin as executive creative directors for the independent agency’s Portland shop. They will start at W+K Portland later this year, joining managing director Jess Monsey in leading the largest of the eight office independent network.
The wife-and-husband duo of Ana and Hermeti are leaving their roles as ECDs and partners at Mother London. The two started at the agency as interns in 2007, and eight years later became the agency’s first ECDs. In their 14-year career at the shop, the creative duo created work for brands including KFC, IKEA and Stella Artois. Notably, they helped Mother London land the KFC UK account in 2017, and produced award-winning work that addressed their distribution crisis. Most recently Mother launched the brand’s first global campaign, which paused the “Finger Licking Good” slogan during the COVID pandemic. Their longstanding relationship with IKEA has produced over a decade of award winning work, including the holidays hit “Silence the Critics.”
Ana and Hermeti have also championed the agency’s use of its creativity and influence for good, leading projects like FreeTheFeed, which broke taboos around breastfeeding in public, and Greenpeace’s Rang Tan campaign, which led to the world’s largest palm oil trader to commit to cleaning-up their supply chain.
Karl Lieberman, W+K’s chief creative officer, said, “Ana and Hermeti are creative powerhouses, and they’ve helped brands show up in the world in really interesting ways. Coming from Mother, they also understand how important and powerful independence is in our industry. But what really attracted us to them is their style of leadership: they’re generous, kind, empathetic, funny, interesting humans who prioritize caring for people and leading from a place of optimism and excitement. They have a great track record leading an agency and empowering people to find their voice and take ownership of the work and the culture. They care deeply about the world, and have a point of view and the conviction to use their influence and creativity to change things for the better. That’s what W+K is all about, and we are really excited to have them in Portland.”
A joint statement from Ana and Hermeti read, “When we came into advertising there were two agencies we dreamed of working at: Mother London and W+K Portland. We feel extremely lucky to have grown up in one of them and now incredibly honored to have been invited to help lead the other.”
Lieberman will step into a leadership role at W+K Portland during the interim prior to Ana and Hermeti starting there. W+K Portland works with Nike, Procter & Gamble, Fisher Price, KFC, Supercell and Samsung, among others.
Review: Malcolm Washington Makes His Feature Directing Debut With “The Piano Lesson”
An heirloom piano takes on immense significance for one family in 1936 Pittsburgh in August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson." Generational ties also permeate the film adaptation, in which Malcolm Washington follows in his father Denzel Washington's footsteps in helping to bring the entirety of The Pittsburgh Cycle — a series of 10 plays — to the screen.
Malcolm Washington did not start from scratch in his accomplished feature filmmaking debut. He enlisted much of the cast from the recent Broadway revival with Samuel L. Jackson (Doaker Charles), his brother, John David Washington (Boy Willie), Ray Fisher (Lymon) and Michael Potts (Whining Boy). Berniece, played by Danielle Brooks in the play, is now beautifully portrayed by Danielle Deadwyler. With such rich material and a cast for whom it's second nature, it would be hard, one imagines, to go wrong. Jackson's own history with the play goes back to its original run in 1987 when he was Boy Willie.
It's not the simplest thing to make a play feel cinematic, but Malcolm Washington was up to the task. His film opens up the world of the Charles family beyond the living room. In fact, this adaptation, which Washington co-wrote with "Mudbound" screenwriter Virgil Williams, goes beyond Wilson's text and shows us the past and the origins of the intricately engraved piano that's central to all the fuss. It even opens on a big, action-filled set piece in 1911, during which the piano is stolen from a white family's home. Another fleshes out Doaker's monologue in which he explains to the uninitiated, Fisher's Lymon, and the audience, the tortured history of the thing. While it might have been nice to keep the camera on Jackson, such a great, grounding presence throughout, the good news is that he really makes... Read More