Bates Dorland has signed Mother’s Jay Pond-Jones as its new
executive creative director, ending a five-month search to replace the
sacked Tim Ashton.
Pond-Jones’s hiring ends weeks of speculation during which time a string
of the industry’s top creative names have been linked with the job.
For Pond-Jones, 40, the move to Dorlands is his second high-profile
switch in little more than six months. It was only in May that he quit
as the creative director of GGT to rejoin his former partner, Robert
Saville, at Mother, leaving the newly arrived Trevor Beattie to run
GGT’s creative department.
The announcement of his arrival, probably at the beginning of February,
comes at a sensitive time for Dorlands, which has been beset by
management upheavals and a sluggish new-business record in the run-up to
next month’s demerger by the Bates network from its Cordiant group
parent.
Ashton fell victim to the changes in June when he was fired by Graham
Hinton, the Dorlands chairman, over what was perceived as a creative
philosophy at odds with the agency’s emphasis on commercially effective
advertising.
The link between Hinton and his new creative chief goes back 12 years to
when Hinton was joint chairman of DMB&B and Pond-Jones was a junior
creative. The pair considered becoming involved in a start-up before
Hinton joined Dorlands last year.
Hinton said: ’Jay has not only produced great ads himself but has
experience of resourcing, stimulating and motivating creative
departments. He’s also mature enough to talk to the kind of heavyweight
clients we have in abundance.’
Pond-Jones said: ’Jobs like this don’t come along very often and the
experience I’ve gathered can now bear fruit at Dorlands, which has
high-profile clients demanding creative excellence.’
Saville said: ’Jay has been exploring his options and a big agency like
Dorlands will suit his talents very well.’
