Creative directors Mark Bernath and Eric Quennoy have been promoted to executive creative directors at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam. The duo will replace Jeff Kling, who resigned from the agency last week.
As the creative force behind the recent Nike “Write the Future” campaign for Nike Football, the team of Bernath and Quennoy spearheaded a globally integrated effort that drew worldwide attention, including more than 40 million online views and over 1.9 billion impressions on Facebook to date. As a team, they have created notable and award-winning work, including the “Here I Am” campaign for Nike Women and the FIFA Street 3 project for EA Sports that produced one of the top viral videos of 2008.
An industry veteran with 13 years’ experience, Bernath joined W+K Amsterdam in 2007 as a creative director working on the Electronic Arts and Nike accounts. He came to W+K from Ogilvy & Mather in New York, where he was a group creative director and created the digital re-launch of Foster’s Lager that won the agency its first One Show Gold Pencil. He also spent time as a creative director at Publicis New York, where he worked on the Fujifilm campaign that won the agency its first Cannes Lion. A North Carolina native, he is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and lives in the center of Amsterdam with his wife and their three boys.
“We’re ready to strap on our safety goggles and play with the most ridiculously fun science experiment in the network,” Bernath said. “When you combine such creative minds from such different cultural backgrounds, the explosion that results can be so inspiring. We’re hopeful that our time with the chemistry set will continue to yield some brave new ideas from the Amsterdam office, and one or two beautiful disasters.”
Born and raised in Australia, Quennoy has been at W+K Amsterdam since April 2006 as a creative director on the Electronic Arts, Heineken and Nike business. Before W+K he was a creative director at Publicis New York, where he created award-winning work for Heineken and Amstel Light, and helped win the TBS account. Prior to that he worked for D’Arcy & Partners in New York, where he was a senior copywriter for three years. He began his career in Melbourne, Australia, working as a copywriter for seven years. He lives in Amsterdam with his wife and their two boys.
“Mark and I are journeymen,” commented Quennoy. “We’ve worked in a bunch of different agencies in a lot of different cities, and we both feel like we found our spiritual home here in Amsterdam. The independent nature of W+K, the incredible roster of clients, against the backdrop of this wonderful city is a hard combination to beat. We’re just honored that Dan [Wieden, co-founder and global executive creative director] has handed us the keys.”
A Similar But Different Take On A Feature Film Debut
Similar But Different is not only the moniker for the directorial duo of Dani Girdwood and Charlotte Fassler but also in some respects an apt description of their feature filmmaking debut, My Fault: London (Amazon MGM Studios). The movie, which premiered last week on Amazon Prime Video, has on one level some select elements similar to what we’re accustomed to in the young adult (YA) universe--which helps make it familiar, comfortable and relatable--yet at the same time My Fault: London brings a new, decidedly different dimension to YA entertainment, uniquely meshing action-adventure, mystery, music, romance and humor. The film captures the feel of the underground London culture, lending an authenticity and contemporary vibe that’s a departure from the norm when it comes to the adaptation of YA literature. This mesh of similar but different has served the film well in that there was some target audience skepticism initially over the notion of doing an English adaptation of the popular, fan-favorite Spanish-language novel “Culpa Mia,” the first of the “Culpables” trilogy. Thus it’s most gratifying for Girdwood and Fassler to see the social media response after the release of My Fault: London, with many viewers enthusiastically embracing the film. My Fault: London introduces us to Noah (portrayed by Asha Banks) who’s uprooted from her U.S. hometown, having to leave her boyfriend and friends behind to move with her mother (Eve Macklin) to London. Mom has a new rich husband (Ray Fearon) in London and their new residence is a mansion. There Noah meets Nick (Matthew Broome), her new stepbrother. They have an immediate mutual dislike for each other which blossoms into something quite different over time. Along the... Read More