R/GA New York has brought industry veteran Steve Whittier on board as executive creative director. Whittier, who will work on the Nike account, has 20 years of experience in both traditional and nontraditional advertising. He has deep experience across a number of categories including action sports, outdoor, youth marketing, automotive, and entertainment. He will report to R/GA’s Nick Law, executive VP, chief creative officer, North America.
Whittier most recently acted as the integrated creative director on the Land Rover USA business at Young & Rubicam, where his work encompassed creative executions across multiple channels including traditional, digital, and direct-to-consumer. In this position, Whittier led a multi-agency collaborative effort to develop numerous campaigns for the brand, including work on several global Land Rover launches alongside Y&R London.
Before joining Y&R, Whittier worked at several other agencies including Factory Design Labs as VP/creative director where he helped grow the agency from a 13-person design shop to a 100-plus-person full-service agency with a national client roster that included Oakley, The North Face, Revo, Brine Lacrosse, and Audi. Prior to Factory Design Labs, he served as creative director at Leo Burnett Kiev for clients such as Fanta, P&G EU, and Coca-Cola.
Whittier has won several Cannes Lions for his work on Land Rover, GE, and Airwalk as well as recognition from The London International Awards, Communication Arts, The Webbys, D&AD and The One Show.
Additionally, Whittier is an advisory board member of Alexandra Cousteau’s Blue Legacy Foundation and a marketing board member of Healing Waters International, a nonprofit organization providing safe water solutions to impoverished communities around the world.
Raoul Peck Resurrects A Once-Forgotten Anti-Apartheid Photographer In “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found”
When the photographer Ernest Cole died in 1990 at the age of 49 from pancreatic cancer at a Manhattan hospital, his death was little noted.
Cole, one of the most important chroniclers of apartheid-era South Africa, was by then mostly forgotten and penniless. Banned by his native country after the publication of his pioneering photography book "House of Bondage," Cole had emigrated in 1966 to the United States. But his life in exile gradually disintegrated into intermittent homelessness. A six-paragraph obituary in The New York Times ran alongside a list of death notices.
But Cole receives a vibrant and stirring resurrection in Raoul Peck's new film "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found," narrated in Cole's own words and voiced by LaKeith Stanfield. The film, which opens in theaters Friday, is laced throughout with Cole's photographs, many of them not before seen publicly.
As he did in his Oscar-nominated James Baldwin documentary "I Am Not Your Negro," the Haitian-born Peck shares screenwriting credit with his subject. "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" is drawn from Cole's own writings. In words and images, Peck brings the tragic story of Cole to vivid life, reopening the lens through which Cole so perceptively saw injustice and humanity.
"Film is a political tool for me," Peck said in a recent interview over lunch in Manhattan. "My job is to go to the widest audience possible and try to give them something to help them understand where they are, what they are doing, what role they are playing. It's about my fight today. I don't care about the past."
"Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" is a movie layered with meaning that goes beyond Cole's work. It asks questions not just about the societies Cole documented but of how he was treated as an artist,... Read More