Goodby Silverstein & Partners has a new chief digital officer, Kalle Hellzén, who joins the San Francisco agency from Acne Production where he was a partner, creative director and director in the L.A. office of the Stockholm-based production company.
Hellzén replaces Mike Geiger, who left just over a year ago to join JWT in New York as North American president, chief integration officer.
During Hellzén’s eight years at Acne he developed work for brands like Toyota, Skittles, Volvo and H&M. Nearly three years ago, he moved to Acne’s fledgling L.A. offices to start its digital operations. Prior to Acne, Hellzén worked as an art director and copywriter at Wieden + Kennedy, Portland in 2002-2004 on accounts like Heineken where he was part of the team behind the brand’s "Meet You There" global launch. Earlier in his career he was an art director in Stockholm at Blond Swedish Amateurs and SWE.
Given his agency experience, Hellzen’s role at GSP will reach more into the creative side than his predecessor Geiger whose orientation was more in the area of digital technology. At Acne, Hellzén worked with GSP on agency campaigns like “Crash the Super Bowl” for Doritos and “Bus Stop Derby” for Yahoo. He admires the agency’s reputation for narrative traditions, traditional as well as digital.
“You need to have respect for human nature,” he said. “There’s a reason people are watching that screaming pig on YouTube and you need to understand that if you want people to care about what you do. This job is so much more than just production and it’s not a separate entity from broadcast production. You still have moving images, iconic messages. You have to put digital in all the spaces within an agency.”
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