New executives at Red Pixel, OwenKessel

Mark Powell

Relocating to Johannesburg from KwaZulu-Natal, Mark Powell has been appointed creative director and head of Red Pixel. He explains, "The company is focused on providing advertising and creative expertise to shopping centres and independent clients. This presents Primedia Lifestyle clients with a full creative service, spanning design, copywriting, illustration, photography, production, radio, video and TV ad creation, among other traditional creative agency services."

According to Doug Mayne, Primedia Lifestyle's MD, "Having a creative director of his calibre at the helm, enables us to complement our marketing solutions with world class creative. This enables us to ensure that each visual and audio touch point is of the highest quality, always linking back to the strategic blue print of each campaign."

Powell qualified as a graphic designer at the Durban Institute of Technology, followed by his tenure at The Flagship Group - the advertising agency custodian to the Tsogo Sun Properties brands including Montecasino and Sun Coast Casino as well as other accounts such as The Pavilion and John Dory's.

He later established his own agency named Hoi Polloi Concept and Design where he secured work with Mr Price Home, Island Tribe and the University of KwaZulu-Natal to name a few. He joined Primedia Lifestyle, where he was responsible for the Gateway Theatre of Shopping brand and overall creative for the mall. This led to the launch of PrimeStudio KwaZulu-Natal, where he took up the position as the studio manager, responsible for providing creative solutions for 20 shopping centres in the company's KwaZulu-Natal portfolio.

OwenKessel ready for future

Donovan Bryan has been appointed as the new executive creative director at OwenKessel, as part of its ongoing growth throughout the South African market.

Bryan has been creative director at DDB and Grey Worldwide and senior art director at Brand Activation. He also spent a long time at TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris.

"I love the fact that OwenKessel is independent, as independent agencies celebrate creativity first and believe that profit will follow. I have not done enough work that I feel is great and have come to OwenKessel to be a part of work that I love and can be proud.

"He has always had a penchant for doing things differently and his body of work has a profound sense of unease with the status quo. You will see a constant challenge and pushing of boundaries and borders - sometimes spectacularly successful and others spectacularly wrong. But always spectacular," says Kessel of Bryan.

"From early on he has had a love/hate relationship with traditional advertising. Respecting the form, the craft and the creativity and striving for the accolades resident in that model. He has achieved great success but always there is the disquiet that accompanies it, the quest for a better way to do it; a more relevant or impressive way to make it work.

"Consequently, a lot of his best work turned out to be ahead of its time and only gets recognition in retrospect. Then again, that's exactly why we've hired him - to lead from the front, to be the herald of innovation for the clients we have and the ones we'll get, that are hell-bent on redefining how they interact with their market, realising that more cohesive relationships are more rewarding and consequently more profitable for them," concludes Kessel.