Pancho Cassis and Fernando Musa of David finally have their man.

After years of trying to recruit him, the agency’s top execs said today that they have hired Daniel Lobatón in the newly created role of chief creative officer North America.

Lobatón, an architect of acclaimed Tide advertising at Saatchi & Saatchi several years ago, including “It’s a Tide Ad” for the Super Bowl, joins the Ogilvy-affiliated David network from independent agency Rethink, which he joined in 2022 to build its New York office.

He will oversee creative at David’s two North American offices, in Miami and New York. He starts on Sept. 23.

At Rethink, Tara Lawall has been promoted to New York CCO, succeeding Lobatón.

Cassis, David’s global CCO, and Musa, co-founder and chairman, have tried to hire Lobatón several times. Now, all three said, the moment was finally right.

“If I have to be super transparent, when Pancho and Musa first offered me a chance to come to David years ago, I don’t think I was ready,” said Lobatón. “The legacy of the place is huge. I was a little bit like, ‘Can I do the David job?’ But I’ve learned so much in the past couple of years. The timing was right this time.”

Likewise, Cassis and Musa have long admired Lobatón’s work—in particular, what he achieved on Procter & Gamble’s Tide.

“More than the admiration, we had this curiosity of, ‘How could Daniel turn around something like Tide?’” said Cassis. “That amazing streak of Tide work with the NFL, and then Marvel—we were on the other side saying, ‘Shit, we do good work, but we want to do something like that, too.’ [With our work] we were always asking, ‘What would Daniel do?’”

Musa said Lobatón’s journey from Saatchi to Rethink prepared him well for David, which is WPP-owned yet operates a bit more like an independent than WPP’s bigger networks (including Ogilvy).

“He has the culture of David in terms of talent and ideas, but he went through these other experiences,” Musa said of Lobatón. “He made that journey, which adds value at this moment.”

What also makes Lobatón attractive, beyond the ideas, is his way with people and how he builds relationships, the David execs said. For an agency that emphasizes human connection—beginning with its logo, which is customized for every employee—this was also a good fit.

“Many, many companies are talking about the tools, the technology, but it’s about the people,” Cassis said. “Besides the work, besides the thinking, besides [our shared] Latino background, that was the match—the fact that Daniel has built amazing relationships with his clients in the past to do amazing work. In that sense, we are super similar.”

The agency’s chief creative officers in Miami and New York—Edgard Gianesi and André Toledo, respectively, will now report to Lobatón. Lobatón will be based in New York and plans to travel frequently to Miami.

The Miami office is the more established of the two. Opened in 2012, it is the agency’s founding office and counts Google Android, Netflix, Pennington, Anheuser-Busch InBev and Coca-Cola among its clients.

The New York office opened in 2022. its clients include Clif Bar (Mondelēz), Clash of Clans (Supercell), AB InBev and Burger King global. The agency recently moved to a new space in the old Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

“The idea is that we operate as a U.S. team, while being respectful of the soul of each one of the two offices,” said Lobatón. “We need to encourage collaboration as David in North America, but let the creative cultures of both shops come across and be louder than ever. To me, that’s a big challenge that I love. The offices are in different stages of maturity in a way, which to me is just potential.”

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Prior to Saatchi, Lobatón worked at VML in Kansas City, Missouri; LatinWorks in Austin, Texas; and Y&R in his hometown of Lima, Perú.

David also has offices in Bogotá, Colombia; São Paulo and Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Madrid.