
Speakers
Donal Keenan
An Awards expert, Donal has spent much of his career at D&AD (Design and Art Direction), having first started in 2007 Donal has worked his way through the Awards Team, where he now operates as Awards Director of D&AD’s Global awards programme, rewarding the very best in global design, advertising and creative communications. Donal has overseen many developments in the expansion of the Awards programme, through the additions of public relations and media awards and the development and running of D&AD’s latest initiative the D&AD Impact Awards in 2016. In 2013 new projects meant Donal also acted as a consultant managing the development and operational launch of the Kyoorius Awards in India, a now well-established regional Awards rewarding the best in Indian Design and Advertising. Prior to D&AD, Donal graduated with a first class bachelor degree in Fine Art and a degree in Art and Design from Cluain Mhuire Art Campus – Galway Institute of Technology, Ireland.
Thierry Astier
Since Thierry Astier joined GREY PARIS as Executive Creative Director in 2012, the agency has seen a significant creative and cultural revival. Proof of this is the big accounts the agency
has own in recent years, including LEGO, Chupa chips, Volvo and Ubisoft as well as the 25 international awards won the last 2 years alone.
Thierry has extensive judging experience at several awards shows and was also a member of the Grey Creative Council, a global collaborative program which serves to set the bar for
creative work across GREY.
Thierry is now offering his services of creative consultancy in almost all the top 20 French
agencies before the launch of a brand new creative shop project called Playground mid 2018.
Louise Thaning
Louise Sonne Thaning is our next speaker of #yoaf18. Louise is coming from a design and marketing background. Currently she spends her days weaving insights from brand, industry, customer and product research to create durable and inspiring directions for brands. Louise has found her niche as a Strategic Brand Planner at TBWA\ & BBDO. Her passion lies in identifying opportunities to engage consumers through great brand stories and experiences. Because culture eats strategy for breakfast, she approaches strategy as a means of creating a platform for growth and esteems to build relevant brands that keep up with the speed of culture.
Rupert Patterson – Ward
Having worked in OOH, online and offline media sales for over a decade, for several of the biggest media owners in the UK, Rupert now commands business development at The Outdoor Advertising Directory (TOAD.ai).
TOAD.ai is the preferred platform of choice for many media agencies when they plan their OOH campaigns.
The mission at TOAD.ai is to consolidate the OOH market and layer it with geo-spatial audience data, providing a website that allows agencies and brands to plan campaigns
online.
Following great OOH experience at Clear Channel UK where Rupert reacted to and generated OOH briefs (classic and digital) for many exciting clients, the opportunity to join a future facing business that is committed to the development of a global Out-of-Home platform was too good an offer to turn down. The future for Out-of-Home is tremendously exciting and the TOAD.ai platform will contribute to accelerate growth of the medium. Accelerating reach, activation and brand fame.
Kevin Bartanian
Kevin Bartanian is the Executive Vice President, Sales & Business Development, where he is responsible for maximizing advertising sales revenue and guiding the sales effort for StandardVision’s products and services throughout the United States and key markets around the world. Kevin’s passion for customer service is the cornerstone of his success, having developed strategic relationships with CEOs, CMOs and media executives of world-class organizations around the world. Prior to joining StandardVision in 2015, Kevin Bartanian served as the Director of National Sales at JCDecaux, the world’s largest outdoor advertising company, where he developed company-wide sales programs and led a top producing business development team. Prior to that, he was the Director of Sales & Marketing at Citi Mobile, a non-traditional outdoor advertising company. Kevin Bartanian began his career at The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, where he served as assistant director.
Alexandre Amaral
Alexandre Amaral is a brazilian Senior Integrated Art Director living in Hamburg and graduated in Advertising and Marketing at ESPM university, Brazil. Currently he works as chief creative director for
Jung von Mat. He started my career in 2004. After a while he was in charge of a full team of creatives. That was a great experience! Over the past 10 years he has worked with some of the best professionals from the advertising industry. Surrounded by this amazing professional background, he has become an experienced Senior Art Director focused on the full integration of areas. During his career, his work has won many international awards including 6 Cannes Lions. Alexandre has worked with iconic and powerful brands such as Nike, Gatorade, MTV, Netflix, Peugeot, FedEx, PayPal, Expedia, Walmart, Lenovo, Nivea, BrMalls, Ben & Jerry’s, Adidas, Mercedes-Benz, DFB, FIFA and CDU.
Shaunt Halebian
Shaunt Halebian is a Senior strategist working on Toyota at Saatchi & Saatchi in Los Angeles. He was born and raised in Southern California where he currently resides. When he was in primary school he realized he was different than the rest of classmates and began to closely observe the similarities and differences between his own culture and his classmates. As his love for exploring counter culture's grew
into obsession he attended UCLA and chose to pursue a degree in anthropology to better understand human groups and behavior. After graduating Shaunt went on to work for some of the top advertising
agencies such as Ogilvy Mather, Venables Bell and Partners, Deutsch Inc, and Saatchi LA. He has a wide range of experience working on some of the largest brands such as Cisco, Volkswagen, Taco Bell, Con Agra, Toyota, and Asics. On his free time he surfs, enjoys live music, modern art galleries and vintage markets.
Saadi Alkouatli
With over 19 years of experience in advertising, Saadi Alkouatli is Creative Director at Leo Burnett Saudi Arabia. Saadi’s quest for advertising began in New York City, where he started with McCann-Erickson in 1998 handling major national accounts. He built his regional experience with Leo Burnett and TBWA in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. His creative work has garnered awards in Cannes, Clios, Lynx and NY Festivals and the Effies.
Vasily Lebedev
Vasiliy Lebedev has been working in the sphere of advertising and communications for more than 13 years. For the last 8 years he has worked as a creative director, and from 2008 as chief
director of the school of creative thinking IKRA. He has developed creative concepts for such outstanding companies like Coca Cola, Unilever, Panasonic, Honda, Infiniti and so on. He has also developed the creative method CRAFT (creative algorithm framework and tools) in the school of creative thinking IKRA, he has invested the inductive approach in educational process and has developed the education by creative methods in corporate block. At this moment IKRA teaches Sberbank, Mail.ru, Aeroflot, Rostelecom etc.
Fabio Costa
Fabio began his advertising career in Brazil at Y&R. He went on to work at Almap BBDO, which was regarded as Brazil’s most creative agency. While there, he helped the agency create its interactive department. Under Fabio’s direction, the agency set a new level of achievement winning numerous awards including a Grand Prix at the London International Awards and dozens of others awards including gold Lions (Cannes) and gold Pencils (One Show). After almost a decade at BBDO Brazil, Fabio moved to Canada as a creative director for Blast Radius and created work for Nike, MINI and BMW Canada. After two winters up north, it was time to head south. In San Francisco he worked for TBWA and Cutwater and applied his story telling award winning perspective for such brands as Ubisoft, Ray Ban, The Walt Disney, Nvidia and The North Face.
At TBWA\Chiat\Day LA, Fabio was the global creative lead on Adidas and nationally on Netflix, Disney, Miller Lite and The Grammy’s. His was a pirate for almost 4 years and his work was recognized at the D&AD, Cannes, The One Show, including a Grand Prix at Clios.
In 2016 when Fabio joined the Saatchi & Saatchi family.
Caio Lazzuri
Caio worked at a number of different companies, including start-ups, small studios, production houses and advertising agencies both in and out of Brazil. During that time, Caio has been busy creating and executing a wide variety of interactive campaigns and experiences for the world's biggest brands, including Coca-Cola, Nike, Target, Microsoft, HP, Chevy, Frito Lay, Target, GE, Sprint, Yahoo!, and others.
Along the way his work has been honored multiple times in festivals such as Cannes, Clio, One Show, D&AD, Art Directors Club, FITC, Obie, FWA, LIAA, AICP, Webby, Andy, Cut&Paste and others. It was also permanently archived at the MoMA, showcased at the Imagina Festival in Monaco, the cover of Popular Science Magazine and featured in major media outlets like the NY Times, WSJ, CNN, ABCNews, CBS, The Huffington Post, The Daily Mail, NY Post, Época, among others.
While at his current job as an Art Director at Wieden+Kennedy, Caio has produced work for Target, Coca-Cola, LAIKA House and the National MS Society.
Caio currently lives in Portland, OR with his wife and cats, none of whom ride a unicycle.
Melanie Clancy
Mel’s focus on innovation started in the mobile space, conceptualizing the first-ever mobile storefront in North America back in 2004. She joined Memac Ogilvy Dubai, where she helped the agency become the most awarded digital and direct agency across the MENA region with her work on Volvo, Chili’s and Toblerone. She joined TBWA in 2011, where she drove the social media account for GE along with digital campaigns, platforms and digital brand journalism for regional accounts such as Nissan, Standard Chartered Bank and Canon.
Currently, she’s a creative director at BBDO Proximity, where she has helped to bring the FWA Cutting Edge Project of the Year to Singapore for the first time. Her work has won recognition at the Cannes Lions, D&AD, One Show, SXSW, London International Awards, Effies, Spikes, Clios, Caples, Epica, Loeries and others. It has been featured on CNN, Good Morning America, Springwise, Mashable, Wired, Contagious, PSFK, Forbes and the Huffington Post.