Creative partners Scott Vitrone and Ian Reichenthal are set to join Wieden+Kennedy‘s New York leadership team as executive creative directors. They will work alongside managing director Neal Arthur. The move marks a return home for Vitrone and Reichenthal who began their first tour of duty at W+K back in 1999, collaborating as a duo for the first time and working on Nike. They now fill the void at W+K N.Y. created by the recent departure of executive creative directors Kevin Proudfoot and Jerome Austria, with Proudfoot landing at Google Creative lab as a co-executive creative director.
Vitrone commented, “When we accepted the job, Dan [Wieden, agency co-founder and global executive creative director] said, ‘Welcome home.’ And that’s exactly how we feel, too. To come back to W+K, 11 years after meeting there and first working together, is really special for us.”
W+K global executive interactive creative director Iain Tait noted that meanwhile the search continues for “an interactive creative director to be a part of the evolved creative leadership of the New York office.”
Vitrone and Reichenthal come back to W+K from Young & Rubicam, New York, where they have led the office’s creative resurgence as co-chief creative officers since 2008. Prior to that, they were group creative directors at TBWAChiatDay, New York, working on the Mars’ brands, including Skittles, Combos and Snickers.
W+K N.Y. works with a growing roster of clients including ESPN, Delta Air Lines, Nike, Jordan Brand, and ABC Television Networks.
Maggie Smith, Star of Stage, Film and “Downton Abbey,” Dies At 89
Maggie Smith, the masterful, scene-stealing actor who won an Oscar for "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" in 1969 and gained new fans in the 21st century as the dowager Countess of Grantham in "Downton Abbey" and Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films, died Friday. She was 89. Smith's sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, said in a statement that Smith died early Friday in a London hospital. "She leaves two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother," they said in a statement issued through publicist Clair Dobbs. Smith was frequently rated the preeminent British female performer of a generation that included Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, with a clutch of Academy Award nominations and a shelf full of acting trophies. She remained in demand even in her later years, despite her lament that "when you get into the granny era, you're lucky to get anything." Smith drily summarized her later roles as "a gallery of grotesques," including Professor McGonagall. Asked why she took the role, she quipped: "Harry Potter is my pension." Richard Eyre, who directed Smith in a television production of "Suddenly Last Summer," said she was "intellectually the smartest actress I've ever worked with. You have to get up very, very early in the morning to outwit Maggie Smith." "Jean Brodie," in which she played a dangerously charismatic Edinburgh schoolteacher, brought her the Academy Award for best actress, and the British Academy Film Award (BAFTA) as well in 1969. Smith added a supporting actress Oscar for "California Suite" in 1978, Golden Globes for "California Suite" and "Room with a View," and BAFTAs for lead actress in "A Private Function" in 1984, "A Room with a View" in... Read More