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.”
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More