Wonderhood Studios secures ad veterans to open creative agency wing
Former Channel 4 chief executive David Abraham’s production venture Wonderhood Studios has made good on its promise to launch a creative agency.
Wonderhood Stuidos
At the studio’s launch in April, Abraham promised to marry advertising and TV in a new way, largely putting the group’s expertise to develop TV programming and branded campaigns under one roof.
At the time, he told The Drum: “We don't see this as a conventional agency or production company. Our ambition is to create a new type of company that operates in both spaces in balance.”
He described the agency as a “blank sheet of paper” claiming that it has more chance of adapting to the model he envisioned than an establish set-in-its-ways company.
With the TV programming wing established, it has scored talent to lead the creative agency side of the business. Aidan McClure joins as executive creative director, Jessica Lovell is chief strategy officer and Alex Best is chief operating officer.
It promises that the appointments will provide brand advertisers with strategic and creative skills tooled for a rapidly changing media and content environment.
McClure comes from BBC Creative, Lovell spent 11 years at Mother and St Luke’s and Best clocked time at HHCL, Fallon and Wieden+Kennedy and Vice’s creative offering Virtue.
Abraham said: “Over the past few months I met many talented people to explore how the vision for Wonderhood Studios is realised. Aidan, Jessica and Alex have been integral to much of the recent breakthrough brand thinking which I admire and are also three of the most likeable and collaborative operators in the business. These appointments now give us the capacity to begin taking on the biggest strategic challenges which brands want to throw at us and we are hungry to get out there and start building fresh and progressive partnerships with clients.”
New hire McClure said he yearned to return to advertising. He described Wonderhood Studios as a “unique opportunity to collide the best bits of [TV and advertising] and to come at problems in a genuinely fresh way.”
Best added that it offered clients “a genuinely different approach to their brands’ challenges in an environment in which attention spans are shifting fundamentally.
The group promises more hires are to come on the creative side in the coming months.