Mal Ward, managing director of Arts & Sciences, will serve as chairperson of the 2022 AICP Show: The Art & Technique of the Commercial.
“We’re delighted to have Mal serve as this year’s chairperson for the AICP Show,” said Matt Miller, president and CEO of AICP. “From its start, he and his company, Arts & Sciences, have been actively involved with AICP and its programs and initiatives, and their history of producing award-winning work speaks to their commitment to creativity and excellence. The AICP Show is in good hands under his leadership.”
“I was thrilled and honored to be selected as the 2022 AICP Show chair,” said Ward. “I’ve always had such reverence for the Show–what it stands for, the level of excellence in production that’s recognized year in and year out, and then just the electricity of those late Spring nights at MoMA always feel special. Knowing that I was chosen by the AICP Show Board of Governors makes it all the more remarkable for me. It is such an amazing group of people that I’ve long admired and respected.”
With director Matt Aselton and executive producer Marc Marrie, Ward launched Arts & Sciences in 2012 as a boutique production company that produces award winning advertising content, music videos, fine art projects and original documentaries and feature films. The company’s work has been recognized by every major advertising award show, winning honors from the AICP Show and AICP Next Awards to Cannes Lions, the Clios, the One Show, the ANDY Awards, and D&AD.
Prior to co-founding Arts & Sciences, Ward was the head of sales and development for Epoch Films. He began his career as the West Coast directors’ representative for legendary production company Propaganda Films. He currently serves on the AICP National Board as a director at large, and served on the AICP Show’s Curatorial Committees in 2018 and 2019.
Ward takes on leadership of the AICP Show as the industry emerges from the challenges of the global COVID pandemic. He sees the strength of the competition as reflective of the creativity and ingenuity of producers across all areas of the ad industry, and is looking forward to seeing what rises to the top for 2022.
“I think the level of work entered in the AICP Show last year, all of which was produced during the pandemic, is a true testament to our skill set as producers, creative thinkers, and problem solvers,” he noted. “The Show had fantastic executions in all categories. Figuring out how to get back to work, whether that was initially producing small scale projects remotely to ramping back up to large scale in-person productions, was no small feat. And given how robust advertising was across all platforms over this past year, I think you’ll see an even more compelling AICP Show in 2022 that represents the best in what we create as an industry.”
The AICP Show is one of the industry’s leading creative and executional benchmarks and serves as more than a mere awards show. Each year, The AICP Show and The AICP Next Awards are preserved in The Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Film’s state of the art archives for future generations to study and are available for use or exhibition by the museum’s curators.
The deadline to enter the AICP Show, along with its companion awards competitions–the AICP Post Awards and the AICP Next Awards–is March 28, 2022.
Forsman & Bodenfors Shifts Its Singapore Group Creative Director Ivan Guerra to Its NYC Hub
Forsman & Bodenfors (F&B) has expanded its creative leadership in New York by relocating longtime group creative director Ivan Guerra from the Singapore office to the Big Apple to support a quickly growing list of new client wins.
As a group creative director in Singapore, Guerra racked up numerous accolades and participated in a myriad of new business wins that fueled the agency’s growth year over year. He explained why now was the right time to come back to the states, adding more nuance in the process. ”Singapore is the business hub of Asia, New York is the business hub of the world,” he said. “Our office in Singapore was small when I arrived. Since then, we’ve more than tripled in size, and became the [number one] most creative agency in the country, and work with more and bigger clients than ever before. There’s always more to be done, but the agency I’m leaving behind is in fantastic shape and ready to take on the world, as I know they will.”
For Guerra, there’s an opportunity to replicate in New York the success he had in Singapore. During his career, he repositioned and promoted businesses and products across a wide variety of markets and industries including P&G, Coca-Cola and Booking.com. Some of his well-known work includes a campaign that increased Samsung’s sales in the Middle East by almost 200%, one of the most iconic films in the history of Converse, Verizon’s most successful sports partnership program “Data Dunk” with the NBA, and a “Proud Whopper” campaign in 2014 that reignited Burger King and garnered 13 Cannes Lions and a Grand Clio.
Coming back to New York after 15 years in the business, including a stint where he spent time at the likes of top-shelf agencies like R/GA,... Read More