This week we’ve completed our Innovation and Integration team line up by welcoming back Beth Bentley. After four and a half years away – at the Government and as Deputy Head of Planning at Adam & Eve/DDB – Beth returns as Digital Strategy and Innovation Director. She brings with her experience including running the Google, Google+ and YouTube business, as we welcome her back into the family fold. One of her main tasks will be identifying opportunities where innovation can support our clients' business in a meaningful and effective new way..

This is Beth:

This is what she has to say: "We live in a golden age of planning. We've never had more ways to bring a creative idea to life. Treating 'digital' as an addendum to a brief, or even as a singular 'channel', is a shame and a waste. W+K is built on thinking, doing and making stuff that's never been done before. To play a key role in digital strategy and innovation thinking here, with these clients, and this team, is incredibly exciting."

Beth’s role sees her work alongside two recent starters whose faces have already adorned this blog. Mr Jim Hunt, our Technical Director, ensures tech excellence throughout the agency and across all departments. He already has one eye on making sure we partner with world class suppliers and the other making sure we ‘make more’ to prototype stage.  And Mr Luke Tipping, who helped shape 101, is already putting creative and media innovation plus emerging tech at the heart of all we do here.

This is Jim on the left. Luke is on the right:

Two familiar faces complete our innovation jigsaw. Danielle Stewart includes Interactive in her production box of tricks in addition to her Head of Broadcast role and Graeme Douglas moves to ICD. In his own words, “We’re in the business of concepting and creating brilliant ideas that work. That will never change. They’ll just be more integrated and relevant that ever before.”

First things first: Beth will be straight back in at the deep end this week, hotly tipped to host tomorrow's drinks trolley. Dig out the Dubonnet, there’ll be Bentley cocktails all round.

Wieden + Kennedy London has hired Andy Cameron, director of Fabrica, the Benetton Group communications research centre, as Interactive Creative Director.

We're delighted to announce a raft of creative
hirings at Wieden + Kennedy London.

With the world changing rapidly, forward-thinking agencies
need to attract creative people with diverse talents and broad skills in order
to engage with customers in new ways across new channels.  Our ambition is to lead the world in
the creativity and innovation of our work. Our new hirings reflect this. First up: Andy Cameron, who joins from Fabrica as
interactive creative director. 

Andy describes himself as an artist but is also a
designer, curator, writer and educator. He created the Hypermedia Research
Centre at the University of Westminster in 1993 and went on to co-found the
ground-breaking and influential Antirom design collective in 1995.  He was also one of the co-founders of Romandson Interactive,
the interactive design practice. In 2001, he was appointed visiting artist, and
subsequently creative director in interaction design at Fabrica, the Benetton Group communications
research centre in Italy.  Andy’s
initiatives for Fabrica include the recent ‘It’s My Time’ campaign – a global
casting competition launched by Benetton using social media to find 20 new
faces from across the world to become Benetton advertising models.  Candidates uploaded a profile with photos of themselves, and the
community — i.e. real people — voted on its
favourites. The top 20, which included men and women from Iran, Belgium,
Kazakhstan and India, were flown to New York City for a campaign shoot
by the photographer Josh Olins.

Andy also co-created Venetian Mirror –
a monumental interactive art installation made at Fabrica – for this year’s
Decode exhibition at the V&A – and provided creative direction for a second Fabrica piece at Decode
– Exquisite Clock – by the young Brazilian artist Joao Wilbert.

Andy says,
‘Fabrica and Benetton: it’s a hard act to follow.  The centre in Treviso and the amazing people there will
always have a special place in my heart, but it has been 8 years and its time
to move on.  The industry is
changing and where better to be part of this revolution than Wieden + Kennedy –
the best creative shop in the world. 
The leadership of the agency – Tony and Kim in London and the global
team in Portland – have convinced me they are serious about change and I’m
going to take them at their word. 
I will do my very best to find innovative new models for clients to
communicate across new channels in new ways.  We want Wieden + Kennedy London to become the destination of
choice for the best young creative talent in digital, interactive and networked
communication from around the world – and together we’re going to reinvent this
industry’.

Tony
Davidson, our ECD says, ‘I love the fact that Andy is not
from the school of advertising. 
The more diverse the talent at Wieden + Kennedy, the more alternative
solutions we can provide.  Andy has
a different skill-set from Kim and me, but what we do have in common is a hunger
to change, disrupt and experiment. 
We need to challenge and ask ourselves what an independent creative
organisation like this can really do.'

Andy will be with us from early May.

Will post more on other new hires later.