Jason Kreher leaves Maximum Effort for top role at experiential studio DE-YAN

Top advertising creative director Jason Kreher is going all in on live experiences, stepping down as a partner at Maximum Effort to join experiential studio DE-YAN as chief creative officer. Kreher was at Maximum Effort for a year, overseeing creative across its investment, marketing and production arms. Prior to that, he was chief creative officer North America at Accenture Song for two years, following a long and distinguished career at Wieden+Kennedy. Kreher’s creative has always been leading-edge and experimental, from classic Old Spice work to Coinbase’s bouncing QR code to Verizon building a network inside Minecraft to artful, surreal work for immersive installation makers Meow Wolf. Enter the free 2025 Young Creatives Contest here Experiential, he said, is the next great space for creatives to play in, with technology and data merging with lived human experience to open up new frontiers for brands creatively. “What I learned at Wieden was how to make an idea, spot an idea, and the point of a big idea is it can travel anywhere. But it usually started with a big TV spot,” he said. “With experiential, you bring your idea to physical life and watch people actually take it in and see what works. And with the technology now, you can scale it or make something nobody’s ever done before.” He added: “You can tell a story and prompt an emotion from an experience and it feels really intimate, but technology is making it much more broad reaching in unknown ways.” There are still relatively few reference points for great experiential, Kreher added, pointing to HBO’s 2018 “Westworld” activation at South by Southwest as a rare example of a project that got huge buzz. The industry is still waiting for the next breakthrough, he said—and the brand dollars are coming in to make it happen as reaching consumers through traditional means gets ever more difficult. “It feels like when we were all scared at Wieden that we wouldn’t crack digital, and then we did,” Kreher said. “It’s on the precipice of great stuff. I keep poking around in new places to do great work, and this is the most exciting place I’ve seen in forever.” DE-YAN was founded in 2014 by Dejan Jovanovic and specializes in tech-driven live experiences for clients including Google, NBA 2K, Louis Vuitton, Meta, PepsiCo, La Mer and Lemme. Last November, private equity firm Shamrock Capital bought an undisclosed stake in the company. Enter the free 2025 Young Creatives Contest here “Clients are finding enormous value in human-first experiences; we are seeing so many new types of brands looking to us to find innovative ways of connecting with customers,” said Jovanovic. Kreher, he said, has “the big-scale strategic thinking we need to achieve our ambitions, plus the deep respect for creativity and craft we live by.” Kreher has also worked with brands including KFC, Target and Coca-Cola. Outside of advertising, he is an author, screenwriter, speaker and frequent collaborator with indie rock band Portugal the Man, for whom he has created several music videos.

Jason Kreher leaves Maximum Effort for top role at experiential studio DE-YAN

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