MONO, a MDC-owned creative agency based in Minneapolis has hired José Acosta to fill a new position, director of integrated production, while promoting Steve Lynch to director of strategy.
After a nationwide recruitment campaign, Acosta joins MONO from Publicis Sapient in Miami where he led integrated production efforts for North America, guiding brands like Jeep, Fiat, T-Mobile, Unilever and Patron for the last six years. Acosta will be responsible for leading both content and digital production disciplines and growing the busy department. Also, under his leadership, will be the continued expansion and innovation of MONO’s in-house studio, The Shed. Almost every client is now actively using The Shed’s content creation and production expertise, doubling the studio’s size in the last year.
“I believe that there is an opportunity to not only build upon MONO’s impeccable track record of producing award-winning work, but also help to construct the production department of the future,” said Acosta.
Lynch has been at MONO for three years, building the connections strategy department from the ground up through his work on clients such as Google Pay, Google One and MillerCoors’ Peroni. In his new role, Lynch will bring MONO’s two distinct brand and connections strategy disciplines into one cohesive department.
“As we developed MONO’s connections strategy team, we recognized that group was bringing valuable customer insights from different perspectives and at a different stage of the strategic process than brand strategy,” said Lynch. “By deliberately weaving these highly-skilled, complementary teams together, we’ll have the most complete and cohesive view of our client’s consumers from beginning to end.” Through this holistic approach, clients will achieve more willful engagement from their consumer, something that’s of growing importance as people continue to take more and more control of their content and media experiences.
Bringing Acosta in and promoting Lynch are all part of a greater effort to strengthen key departments at MONO. Late last year, MONO hired its first first-ever executive creative director, Vanessa Fortier, and shifted two of its three founders–Michael Hart and Chris Lange–into a split role of chief creative officer. Ultimately, these shifts will set up MONO to better serve its growing list of clients, which includes MillerCoors, Walmart, Google and Sherwin Williams.
Carrie Coon Relishes Being Part Of An Ensemble–From “The Gilded Age” To “His Three Daughters”
It can be hard to catch Carrie Coon on her own.
She is far more likely to be found in the thick of an ensemble. That could be on TV, in "The Gilded Age," for which she was just Emmy nominated, or in the upcoming season of "The White Lotus," which she recently shot in Thailand. Or it could be in films, most relevantly, Azazel Jacobs' new drama, "His Three Daughters," in which Coon stars alongside Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen as sisters caring for their dying father.
But on a recent, bright late-summer morning, Coon is sitting on a bench in the bucolic northeast Westchester town of Pound Ridge. A few years back, she and her husband, the playwright Tracy Letts, moved near here with their two young children, drawn by the long rows of stone walls and a particularly good BLT from a nearby cafe that Letts, after biting into, declared must be within 15 miles of where they lived.
In a few days, they would both fly to Los Angeles for the Emmys (Letts was nominated for his performance in "Winning Time" ). But Coon, 43, was then largely enmeshed in the day-to-day life of raising a family, along with their nightly movie viewings, which Letts pulls from his extensive DVD collection. The previous night's choice: "Once Around," with Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfus.
Coon met Letts during her breakthrough performance in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?" on Broadway in 2012. She played the heavy-drinking housewife Honey. It was the first role that Coon read and knew, viscerally, she had to play. Immediately after saying this, Coon sighs.
"It sounds like something some diva would say in a movie from the '50s," Coon says. "I just walked around in my apartment in my slip and I had pearls and a little brandy. I made a grocery list and I just did... Read More