Agency news you need to know this week

Slutty Vegan 'thirst trap' Mojo Supermarket is at it again. The New York-based agency posted a “thirst trap” on LinkedIn featuring a plant that resembles a specific human feature in hopes of getting the attention of Slutty Vegan. The vegan restaurant chain this week launched a review for its first creative agency of record. “Taking this opportunity to post an agency thirst trap for Slutty Vegan ATL AOR. Our slutty people would love to be in touch with your slutty people,” the Mojo Supermarket post reads. This is the second time that Mojo has used LinkedIn as a lure for a pitch. In March, the agency posted a video in which it pretended to hold a Popeyes chicken sandwich hostage until Mojo was let into the fast feeder's creative review. The post ended up getting over 500 likes and a comment from Popeyes CMO Jeff Klein. Despite the attention-grabbing post, Popeyes earlier this month named McKinney as its creative agency of record. Read more: Slutty Vegan seeks its first AOR Ad Age Breakout Brand Leaders New award honors the people behind emerging brands Enter here Assembly names North American CEO Assembly has named Valerie Davis, its North American president, to CEO of North America, a new post. Davis will continue to oversee all agency operations in the region as part of Assembly’s client relations and new business. During her three years at Assembly, Davis reorganized its agency teams to facilitate collaboration and helped draw 32 new client engagements in 2022, notching a 21% year-over-year increase in new business revenue. She implemented a “Better Together” philosophy for Assembly's global DE&I strategy, emphasizing belonging and inclusion to work toward an equitable workplace. In other executive moves, Assembly promoted Asia-Pacific Managing Director Richard Brosgill to APAC CEO and Middle East & North Africa Managing Director Faisal Dean to MENA CEO. Former Havas Media chief Matt Adams was hired as Assembly CEO in Europe. All these positions are newly created roles, according to a spokeswoman for the agency. The Chrysalis Initiative won’t be ignored The Chrysalis Initiative, a group dedicated to confronting racial inequalities in breast cancer treatment and care for Black women, is launching a new campaign in partnership with marketing agency Eversana Intouch. Called “Inequality You Can’t Ignore,” the campaign targets health care providers to highlight the stories of three women negatively affected by discrimination in their breast cancer care. The push revolves around photography that depicts these women with the inequality symbol painted across their breasts in white. A QR code on the posters can activate an AR experience that offers facts on the biases Black women face and takes users to a microsite where they can learn more, sign up for unconscious bias training and access other resources. Several hospitals in the New York tri-state area were asked to display the campaign in their lobbies, but they declined or dismissed the request, the Initiative said. In response, the group placed the posters on bus shelters that line the commuting routes hospital employees were likely to travel. In addition to the out-of-home component, Eversana Intouch created a film that features the three women in the campaign telling their stories and discussing the unconscious bias that exists in healthcare. Stagwell crowns SaaS platform as internal “Shark Tank” winner “SmartAssets,” an AI-powered SaaS platform, was chosen as the winner of Stagwell’s 2022 Innovation Competition. SmartAssets uses AI to categorize assets within a brand’s creative library and measures the impact of its ads through performance analytics for creative and media teams. The platform can then make instantaneous changes to the creative based on those insights. AI marketing blog How brands are using ChatGPT, DALL-E 2 and other tools Read more here The platform was developed by employees of Stagwell’s multilingual content and media consultancy Locaria, including Chief Operating Officer Lindsay Hong, Data Scientist Eric Walzthöny and Innovation Lead Vitaly Boitelet. For winning the competition, the Locaria team will receive $1 million in funding to launch. This is the fifth year of Stagwell’s annual competition, which has seen winners including PRophet, the first AI-powered predictive pitch and content generation platform for PR, communications and marketing professionals. Bringing awareness to child abuse Republica Havas teamed up with the non-profit Amigos with Kids to launch an out-of-home campaign to bring attention to the organization’s mission of preventing child abuse. “Child abuse occurs in all social classes regardless of the religion, origin or age of the adults involved,” Tony Waissmann, chief creative officer of Republica Havas, said in a statement. “What we’re trying to show in this campaign is Amigos For Kids’ commitment to the fight, so that this happens less and less and also to clearly exemplify how those objects that are used to perpetrate abuse should only be used for the purpose for which they were created.” The campaign will exist across the U.S. throughout April which is also National Child Abuse Prevention Month. Clean Creatives lines up pledges Environmental activist group Clean Creatives announced that 500 agencies have signed its pledge not to work with fossil fuel companies. Clean Creatives' previous efforts around carbon emissions include releasing a letter with scientists urging PR companies and agencies to drop their fossil fuel clients in January of last year. More recently, the group criticized industry group Ad Net Zero during its U.S. launch in February for not providing a plan to stop its supporting organizations working with fossil fuel clients. Read more: Ad Net Zero launches U.S. chapter See Every Student Goodby Silverstein & Partners launched a brand film for education tech company Renaissance that coincides with the brand’s first new visual identity in 40 years. The branding, created by the independent design agency Pentagram, includes a new logo. The 30-second spot, called “Dopplelearners,” shows a day in the life of a high school student struggling with different aspects of school, including public speaking and gym class, until the student is shown finally getting some help from a teacher that is using Renaissance’s software. The spot, which was directed by Clay Weiner from Biscuit Filmworks, will run internationally in late spring and is the first piece of creative in Renaissance’s “See Every Student” campaign. “We can all remember moments from our school days when we felt a bit at sea and the one teacher who really helped us feel seen in those moments,” GS&P Creative Director Jon Wyville said in a statement. “As we worked with Clay to develop the script, we talked a lot about John Hughes and all his funny yet deeply emotional films. We wanted to create a kind of day-in-the-life story of highs and lows in which you empathized not only with the student, but ultimately with the teacher as well.” Sunday Afternoon’s new executive creative director Minority and woman-owned creative agency Sunday Afternoon hired Rich Tu for the newly created role of executive creative director and partner. Tu previously served as a group creative director at Jones Knowles Ritchie, and he most recently worked on a solo project with the music arm of A24 Films on the soundtrack release of the multiple Oscar-winning film “Everything Everywhere All At Once.” Tu has also spent time outside of the agency world, working for companies such as Nike and ViacomCBS. This is a reunion for Tu, who was one of the first artists to be part of the Sunday Afternoon roster when the agency first launched in 2015. Just briefly Marketing agency Bully Pulpit Interactive hired Dhurv Nanda as creative director, a new role for the agency. Nanda previously held creative director roles at the Farmer’s Dog and Oberland. Atlanta-based agency PureRED named Jason Whiting as its first chief growth officer. Most recently, he served as a chief growth officer for the U.S. and Canada at Media.Monks. Courage is expanding its team following a streak of new business wins, which includes picking up accounts such as KFC Canada and CIBC. Kat Ledgett joins the team as account director; Domenique Raso as creative director; Rami Dudin as group strategy director; Cindy Marie Navarro as creative director; Saloni Wadehra as group account director; and Amna Khalid as account director. Contributing: Jade Yan

Agency news you need to know this week

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