Barbarian hires ex-Peloton creative as its chief creative officer
Tim Wilson previously was with the fitness equipment brand for three years.
Astrong
Barbarian has hired Tim Wilson, formerly a creative director at Peloton Interactive, as its new chief creative officer.
The role was previously held by Resh Sidhu, who left the agency in February to join Snap as the global director for its augmented reality creative studio Arcadia.
“I've been in the industry for over 20 years now and what excites me is the ability to transform brands and agencies servicing those brands,” Wilson said. “Barbarian to me represented an agency that has such a strong leadership team that all came from big agencies and major brands, but we're a smaller agency. We have the leadership and experience of a much larger organization. Personally, I like this more manageable size because I feel like as an agency, there are a lot fewer layers we have to wade through. It's going to allow us to stay super nimble and dynamic.”
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Wilson, who mainly worked on campaigns across Peloton’s bike, app, and apparel business lines, also helped build the brand's creative strategy department along with his boss at the time Bryant Brennan, senior VP, global creative at Peloton. Wilson is also no stranger to the agency world, having held creative leadership roles at agencies such as R/GA, Publicis Sapient, BBDO, and AKQA.
Among other efforts, Wilson worked on Peloton's “Nothing like Working Out from Home” campaign launched in June with the help of the brand’s lead agency Mekanism.
Wilson’s hire solidifies a new leadership team that joined the Cheil Worldwide-backed agency recently. Within the last year, Barbarian brought on ex-Futurebrand Chief Strategy Officer Eliza Yvette Esquivel as its own chief strategy officer; Lawrence Edmondson, formerly at Squarespace, as chief technology officer; Alec Troxell from Media Kitchen as the agency’s director of business development and marketing; and Melissa Fry, previously at Keurig Dr Pepper, as director of people and culture.
The appointments are part of a continued transformation that the agency, which redesigned its look in June, has been working on since it saw a string of executives depart in 2016, including Co-Founders Keith Butters and Benjamin Palmer. Former R/GA exec Steven Moy took over as CEO in 2019 and knew one challenge for the agency was securing more long-term clients that weren’t project-based.
“When I took over the business I would say over 80% was project-related work, basically helping a client with one aspect of digital transformation,” Moy said. “I wanted to be a new type of digital transformation agency. I wanted to be the company that can support clients through every single stage of its transformation, which in some cases could be a digital campaign, a website design or ecosystem, planning a digital strategy. Back then we were under 100 people. Then we started looking into what work we should retire, and what work we need to go after. It took us a while.”
Last year the agency was able to secure eight new accounts for brands like Post Consumer Brands, Baker Hughes and Reflexion, and was named digital agency of record for American Express. Barbarian also grew its business with Samsung, which owns Cheil. The agency was named global digital agency lead for the phone brand’s seasonal campaigns; previously Barbarian worked only on phone launch campaigns. This year the agency was named social agency of record for HubSpot.
Moy credits its recent account success to its focus on creating work faster and building out new offerings like its innovation consulting practice called Barbarian Labs, which helped launch Mucinex’s “Sickwear” clothing line in October 2020.
New business has also led to the agency growing in size by 75% last year, up from around 50 employees at the start of 2021.
