Yesterday, the marketing and design firm Code and Theory announced that it had hired John Long, formerly of brand design agency Huge, as their new Group Creative Director.
Born in New Jersey, the creative formerly led the Dick's Sporting Goods, Nestlé, and Pizza accounts for Huge, among others. The last thing he worked on at Huge was a Super Bowl social campaign for Dick's Sporting Goods. To engage fans during the game, Long and his team produced real-time replays of key plays in the style of an old school, 8-bit video game and shared them on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Long is not the first Huge alum to get pilfered away by Code and Theory, the New York-based firm responsible for some of the splashiest websites in publishing, including Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and most recently, Bloomberg. Long will be sharing his title with Ross Maupin, his now co-director who was previously hired by Code and Theory back in November. He's the latest in a spree of hires that has seen Code and Theory beef up its staff by 30% in the past year alone.
Long and Maupin first became a team at Huge. The two of them worked together Ameritrade's campaign for the 2014 Winter Olympics, work which garnered Huge its first ever Clio award for creative excellence and design in advertising. "We really have a similar sensibility on good work and how you should approach work," Long says.
Besides looking forward to joing Maupin, Long says he's excited about joining a small and nimble agency like Code and Theory, which has fewer than 300 employees — that's less than half the size of Huge.
"The opportunity is special," Long says. "When you look at the landscape of the industry, everyone is trying to figure out digital. Anyone who says they've figured it out is lying. And these big agencies, they have talented creatives on staff who understand digital, but the ship's so big, it moves slowly. Code & Theory is still trying to figure digital out too, but it can move faster than other agencies. There's just so much energy here."