Trailer Park–Engine’s full-service creative agency specializing in content creation, entertainment marketing and 360-degree campaigns–has brought William Gelner on board as chief creative officer.
Before joining Trailer Park, Gelner helped build 180LA where he was chief creative officer and managing partner. Throughout his 10 years there, he led the agency to win major clients like Pepsi, Sony, adidas, Boost Mobile, Expedia, Mitsubishi, HP, ASICS, Miller Lite, University of Phoenix and UNICEF. During Gelner’s tenure there, the shop earned numerous accolades including three Grand Prix and a Titanium Lion at Cannes. Prior to 180LA, Gelner had been a group creative director at BBH New York where he launched the innovative branded content series on MTV called “Gamekillers” for Unilever’s male grooming brand, Axe. Gelner previously worked at such agencies as Cliff Freeman and Fallon.
In his new role at Trailer Park, Gelner will be responsible for driving creative vision across the agency’s wide array of clients. In addition, he will provide creative leadership more broadly for the Engine Content division, under which Trailer Park operates, working with clients to design highly creative and effective campaigns based on groundbreaking data intelligence. He will report to Zihla Salinas, CEO of Trailer Park and Engine Content.
Combining Engine’s data-driven insights, distribution and technology with Trailer Park’s creative talent and production chops, Gelner is in a unique position to drive client vision leveraging a full suite of vertically integrated capabilities.
In recent months, Trailer Park has made significant investments in senior leadership to further solidify its innovative creative agency model driven by the company’s entertainment heritage, and its large-scale in-house production capabilities. Gelner’s hire comes on the heels of Trailer Park adding SVP and development director Howard Moggs in July and CEO Salinas in March.
“This is something totally new and exciting for me because it’s an opportunity to flip the creative agency model to be built on the things we make, not the hours we bill. By combining Trailer Park’s legendary heritage in entertainment, its deep production bench of over 500 makers in-house and Engine’s data and media expertise, I believe we can offer clients something different and necessary.”
The addition of Gelner rounds out a new leadership team during a period of growth for Trailer Park. This news follows the spring launch of Trailer Park’s Marquee, a dedicated strategy group, which provides clients with consumer insights and research (national and real time), behavioral data and strategic counsel. With the aim to lead the conversation around the current and future state of the entertainment, its first co-branded report in partnership with the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, “Marketing content in the attention matrix,” debuted early July.
