CAREERS: Keeble joins Lowe in regional CD role

Lowe Lintas & Partners has appointed Giles Keeble as regional creative director. Keeble will bring to the job 25 years of experience in the London ad industry, most recently at Publicis and Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO. In his newly-created position at Lowe's, he will lead Hong Kong, mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand creativity, reporting to the agency's regional president Ian Creasey and regional chief executive Ronald Yue. In the short-term, his focus will be on the agency's newly-acquired HSBC account. Before joining Lowe's, Keeble worked for Publicis for just over two years, helping set up its Publicis Technology new-media division, now known as Publicis Networks, and eventually becoming creative director of its direct marketing and contract publishing arms as well. His previous job was at AMV BBDO's cross-platform design and advertising group Open. Before that he was executive creative director of Leo Burnett London and creative and board director at WCRS, after starting his career in advertising as a planner. Keeble said that his mission has been to try to build "the agency of the future", a company that comes up with the best communications solution for clients, without trying to push them down a particular route. "I'm interested to see if there's a way for creative people, in the broadest sense, to come up with creative solutions regardless of media," he commented. "An agency should have the integrity to say that the solution may not be advertising, and the client should have the integrity to pay for that advice. There's no client that wouldn't benefit from open creative thinking. One of the functions of the agency of the future should be to ask 'what if' questions." He's scornful of most agency attempts at integration, however: "You need to start with integrated thinking, but that might not come up with an integrated solution. It's not about making everything the same - that way lies the path of making the print ad a still from the TV campaign. If you try and force it, it doesn't happen. "The place where people already think in an integrated way is in pitches. People need to keep on thinking as if they're in a pitch. It often doesn't happen, because the budget doesn't work that way, and because that way doesn't necessarly lie the awards that make a difference to your career." It won't all be reinventing the way agencies work, however. "There's a job to be done doing some good advertising," said Keeble. "A big institution like HSBC needs consistency of thinking about what the brand stands for."

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