Mark Krajan has joined DDB San Francisco as group creative director. He will report to executive creative director Ben Wolan. In this new role, Krajan will oversee Norton, VMware, and new business efforts.
Krajan is Wolan’s first hire to a creative leadership position, making his appointment a vital component of the creative resurgence at DDB San Francisco.
With almost 20 years of industry experience, Krajan comes to DDB from Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners where he served as creative director. During this time, Krajan led numerous Super Bowl campaigns, including a rebranding effort for MINI, a T-Mobile spot with Tim Tebow, and the Evony mobile game launch for TopGames. He also pitched and produced the DraftKings launch campaign during the 2016 NFL season.
Krajan’s award-winning creative portfolio also includes campaigns for clients such as Priceline, Google, Xbox, Microsoft, Hotwire.com, General Motors, AT&T, Chiquita, and El Pollo Loco.
Earlier in his career, Krajan founded his own agency in San Francisco with clients such as Yahoo!, Logitech, San Francisco Visitors Bureau, and the San Francisco Earthquakes. The agency later merged with Teak. Prior to that, he honed his craft at TBWAChiatDay LA and the former McCann-Erickson San Francisco.
From Restoring To Hopefully Preserving Multi-Camera Categories At The Emmys
When Gary Baum, ASC won his fourth career Emmy Award earlier this month, it was especially gratifying in that the honor came in a category--Outstanding Cinematography for a Multi-Camera Half-Hour Series--that had been restored thanks in part to a grass-roots initiative among cinematographers to drum up entries. Last year the category fell by the wayside when not enough multi-camera entries materialized.
In his acceptance speech, Baum appealed to the Television Academy to keep multi-camera categories alive. He later noted to SHOOT that editors also got their multi-camera recognition back in the Emmy competition this year. Baum hopes that after resurrecting multi-camera categories in 2024, such recognition will be preserved for 2025 and beyond.
A major factor in the decline of multi-camera submissions in 2023 was the move of certain children’s and family programming from the primetime Emmy competition to the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ (NATAS) Emmy ceremony. For DPs this meant that multi-camera programs last year were reduced to vying for just one primetime nomination slot in the more general Outstanding Cinematography for a Series (Half-Hour) category. It turned out that this single slot was filled in ‘23 by a Baum-lensed episode of How I Met Your Father (Hulu).
Fast forward to this year’s competition and Baum won for another installment of How I Met Your Father--”Okay Fine, It’s A Hurricane,” which turned out to be the series finale. Two of Baum’s Emmy wins over the years have been for How I Met Your Father, and there’s a certain symmetry to them. His initial win for How I Met Your Father was for the pilot in 2022. So he won Emmys for the very first and last... Read More