Jason Elm has been appointed chief creative officer of DDB California. In this role, Elm will lead the California creative department and will be responsible for all its output. He reports to Mike Harris, CEO of DDB California.
Elm fills the CCO role previously held by Lisa Bennett who became executive VP, creative at DDB North American in January.
Prior to joining DDB, Elm served as executive VP, group creative director at Deutsch LA, where he oversaw all Diamond Foods brands, such as Pop Secret, Emerald Nuts and Kettle Brand Chips. Most recently, he helmed the Sony PlayStation account for five years.
A Los Angeles native, Elm joined Deutsch in 1998 as a copywriter and was a key part of the agency’s culture and growth for 15 years, penning ads for clients including Expedia.com, Coors Light, DirecTV, California Milk Advisory Board and Mitsubishi. Elm began his career with stints at Southern California agencies including Bozell and Lois/Colby.
Elm is well known for having personally created the Twitter feed for PlayStation’s @TheKevinButler, which became the most-followed brand character on Twitter. His California Cheese “Happy Cows–Sprinkler” spot was voted “Best of SuperBowl XXXVIII” by CBS, and the PlayStation “To Michael” film was awarded in Cannes, The One Show, D&AD and Clios.
Lucy Walker Made A Searing Documentary About Wildfires In 2021; Now, People May Be More Inclined To Listen
When Lucy Walker debuted her harrowing documentary about California wildfires, "Bring Your Own Brigade," at Sundance in 2021, it was during peak COVID. Not the best time for a film on a wholly different scourge.
"It was really hard," the Oscar-nominated filmmaker says now. "I didn't blame people for not wanting to watch a film about the fires in the middle of the pandemic, because it was just too much horror."
And so the film, though acclaimed — it was named one of the 10 best films of the year by the New York Times – didn't reach an audience as large as Walker had hoped, with its urgent display of the human cost of wildfires and its tough, crucial questions for the future.
That could change. Walker thinks people may now be more receptive to her message, given the devastating wildfires that have wrought havoc on Los Angeles itself the past week. Firefighters were preparing on Tuesday to attack new blazes amid warnings that winds combined with severely dry conditions created a " particularly dangerous situation."
"This is probably the moment where it becomes undeniable," she said in an interview.
She added: "It does feel like people are now asking the question that I was asking a few years ago, like, 'Is it safe to live in Los Angeles? And why is this happening, and what can we do about it? And the good news is that there are some things we can do about it. What's tricky is that they're really hard to accomplish."
Documenting the human cost, confronting complacency
In "Bring Your Own Brigade" (available on Paramount+), Walker portrays in sometimes terrifying detail the devastation caused by two wildfires on the same day in 2018, products of the same wind event — the Camp Fire that engulfed the... Read More