VCCP has brought in veteran ECD Yan Elliot to head up the Barclays account, which the agency won in April. An advertising creative since the 90s, Elliott’s CV includes Mother, WCRS, Lucky Generals, T&P and AMVBBDO.
Sometimes an agency needs a person with a whole career’s worth of experience to do the job. But when so many junior roles are threatened by AI, who will be the reliable big guns of the future? VCCP, which took over Barclays from BBH after a pitch against M&S Saatchi, TBWA and Grey, and can’t have wasted much time in securing Elliott to keep the whole thing creatively on track.
Elliott – who also founded his own agency, Fabula in the 2010s – worked on some much-loved campaigns including Orange’s “Gold spots”, Dr Pepper’s “What’s the worst that can happen?” and Sky’s “Believe in better”. He joins from IPG’s Weber Shandwick, where he has spent the last couple of years as a CCO.
Chris Birch and Jonny Parker, joint CCOs at VCCP, said: “Yan’s written some of the greatest ads of our time –– stuff that properly lodged itself in culture. And now he’s bringing all that brilliance (and mischief) to VCCP. On top of that, he once ran his own agency from a canal boat, which makes him officially cooler than the rest of us.”
Elliott, who will also chip in on other VCCP clients, said: “VCCP has a track record of making ideas that break out into the real world and become part of culture. That’s always been my ambition too – to create work that people genuinely notice, enjoy and remember. I’m excited to join such a brilliant team who are hungry to keep pushing the work further.”
Maybe Elliott was motivated to escape Weber Shandwick by the looming IPG-Omnicom merger, but either way, his move to VCCP demonstrates the continued allure of advertising for the people who have really been allowed to grow up in it.
