Cawley NealTBWA has rebranded as TBWADublin, marking a new chapter in the company’s development. Additionally TBWADublin has appointed John Kane as executive creative director.
Kane started his career in Dublin before moving to Sydney, where he spent five years at Leo Burnett Sydney before starting his own agency, Happy Soldiers, which quickly became internationally recognized. Kane has won more than 30 major international awards, including Cannes Lions, Clios, D&AD and a Grand Prix Effie. More recently he founded Idea Gallery, an innovation and accelerator company that has worked with clients around the world, such as Coca Cola, Subaru, Diageo and Virgin.
The TBWADublin rebranding is intended to better reflect the agency’s “Re-founders” culture, which describes the innovative process of determining a new creative vision in the absence of the agency’s original founders. A group of “Re-founders” drive the agency forward by discovering an improved and updated offering that builds upon their strong heritage while looking towards the future. New initiatives seek to revitalize the agency’s entrepreneurial DNA and communicate its unique global and local identity to new and existing staff and clients.
Deirdre Waldron, CEO of TBWADublin, explained, “We are the Disruption® company, so we aim to disrupt ourselves and our clients as much as we can. We’ve entered an exciting new phase where we’re creatively finding a new purpose, driven by the global creative powerhouse that is TBWA and our local ‘Re-founders’ culture. This rebrand gives us a new platform to talk about a lot of our new initiatives. We continue to add talent to the very strong team that is already here in the agency, as well as a new vision, and new ways of working that we feel are much more reactive to the challenges in our industry.”
TBWADublin’s joint managing director, Fergal Behan, cited one of those new initiatives as being in-house production brand TBWAMake. “At the heart of our ‘Re-founders’ culture is entrepreneurialism and we’ve built an in-house studio that allows us to drive better value for our clients while also providing for more reactive content that allows us to create at the speed of culture.”
TBWADublin’s Joint MD, Mark Nolan, added, “As ‘Re-founders,’ we have a vision whereby we don’t just make better things, we try and make things better. This has galvanized the agency in always going the extra mile for better creative output, better results for our clients and, ultimately, for the betterment of our society. The results are promising: we’re winning new business and awards and developing a strong tech and data backbone that we’re very proud of.”
