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.
Steven Soderbergh Has A Multi-Faceted “Presence” In His Latest Film
Steven Soderbergh isn't just the director and cinematographer of his latest film. He's also, in a way, its central character.
"Presence" is filmed entirely from the POV of a ghost inside a home a family has just moved into. Soderbergh, who serves as his own cinematographer under the pseudonym Peter Andrews (his father's name), essentially performs as the presence, a floating point-of-view that watches as the violence that killed the mysterious ghost threatens to be repeated.
For even the prolific Soderbergh, the film, which opens Friday in theaters, was a unique challenge. He shot "Presence" with a small digital camera while wearing slippers to soften his steps.
The 62-year-old filmmaker recently met a reporter in a midtown Manhattan hotel in between finishing post-production on his other upcoming movie ("Black Bag," a thriller Focus Features will release March 14) and beginning production in a few weeks on his next project, a romantic comedy that he says "feels like a George Cukor movie."
Soderbergh, whose films include "Out of Sight," the "Ocean's 11" movies, "Magic Mike" and "Erin Brockovich," tends to do a lot in small windows of time. "Presence" took 11 days to film.
That dexterous proficiency has made the ever-experimenting Soderbergh one of Hollywood's most widely respected evaluators of the movie business. In a wide-ranging conversation, he discussed why he thinks streaming is the most destructive force the movies have ever faced and why he's "the cockroach of this industry."
Q: You use pseudonyms for yourself as a cinematographer and editor. Were you tempted to credit yourself as an actor for "Presence"?
SODERBERGH: No, but what I did is subtle. For the first and... Read More