In the agency world’s latest major hire-from-home move, Weber Shandwick has appointed Ciro Sarmiento as its first-ever New York chief creative officer. Sarmiento will be moving from Dallas-based multicultural agency Dieste, where he served in the same role for more than seven years.

Sarmiento will oversee the New York creative department and will be charged with elevating and driving the agency’s “earned-first” creative ideas and innovation. 

Sung Chang, Weber Shandwick chief impact officer, says that Sarmiento’s leadership and experience will be key to expanding the company’s offerings to its clients, “particularly in this moment, when our clients need creative thinking and diverse perspectives that will help them emerge from the pandemic with strength and resilience.”

As for adding a new CCO role, “we are lucky to have an already incredibly talented team of ECDs in New York, and around our global network,” Chang says. “But because creativity is core to our work, growing our team with more creative leaders is an ongoing priority. This does not signal a change in our creative organization or strategy. It’s about bringing in more senior creative firepower.”

“I feel charged by this incredible energy right now because I know I’ll be surrounded by kind and fearless people with endless curiosity," Sarmiento says. "As a creative who is passionate about multicultural perspective, I truly believe I have come to the right place. WSNY shares my same drive, my respect for a creative culture and the desire to solve marketing, brand and social challenges with ingenuity and powerful insights. It’s the perfect environment for me, and I’m honored to join them.”

Sarmiento began his career as a copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather Bogotá, before moving into creative director roles at Leo Burnett/Lapiz and Latinworks, helping to propel the latter to an Ad Age Agency A-List title in 2011. He began his career as a copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather Bogotá.

Sarmiento has worked with a number of major clients across a swath of categories, including Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, Gillette, GlaxoSmithKline, Kellogg, Mars, Mattel, Procter and Gamble and Unilever. 

As CCO of Dieste, Sarmiento worked to create a culture that put creativity, diversity and inclusion at the forefront and delivered standout ideas that leveraged powerful cultural insights about multicultural audiences, such as a humorous campaign for Goya foods that tapped into the angst Latino parents might have about preserving their cultural traditions.

Other ads, for example, were just plain fun, including a 2018 World Cup ad for brew brand Sangre de Malta that poked fun at the time difference soccer fans in the U.S. had to deal with.

Sarmiento’s appointment continues a line of major creative hires that have occurred as agencies and companies continue to work—and hire—from home during the pandemic. Other CCO appointments we’ve seen in the last year include Rafael Rizuto, who became CCO at BBH New York after closing his own San Francisco-based shop TBD and Karen Costello’s return to Deutsch L.A. as CCO, after serving in the same post at The Martin Agency, which Danny Robinson then took on.