Tombras hires its first executive creative director from Maximum Effort

It took five words and a number to convince Dooley Tombras he had to hire Avinash Baliga as his agency’s first executive creative director.

They came in a tweet Baliga worked on last fall, when he was a creative director and copywriter at Maximum Effort. He was working on social media for Weight Watchers when he read that Adidas had cut ties with the rapper Kanye West. Seeing an opening for the brand to weigh in, he went for it.

The amusing tweet, which got almost 200,000 likes, is just one example of Baliga’s knack for sharp, quick, culturally attuned creative. But for Tombras, which built a reputation in part on witty social work for MoonPie and Steak-umm, it was evidence of a kindred spirit.

Combined with his more expansive—yet still culturally resonant—work on accounts such as Mint Mobile, it was clear Baliga’s sensibility would mesh well at Tombras.

“That was probably my favorite tweet of the year. It was a tweet that made me jealous,” said Tombras, the Knoxville, Tennessee-based agency’s president. “It’s so hard to find somebody that can do platform/tagline thinking but also cultural, real-time, mobile-style thinking—and write a punch-you-in-the-mouth tweet like that.”

Jeff Benjamin, the agency’s chief creative officer since 2019, already knew what Baliga brought to the table. The two worked together in the final years of Barton F. Graf, the now-defunct indie agency founded by Gerry Graf that was revered for its own irreverent style and shrewd plays in culture. 

“We knew each other at a special time,” Baliga said of Benjamin. “Those things really foster bonds, when things are closing around you. We were pitching a lot and making lots of work. Creatively, it was one of the most interesting times of my life.” 

When Barton F. Graf closed at the end of 2019, Baliga went to Mother for two years. He then jumped to Maximum Effort, the agency started by Ryan Reynolds and George Dewey, where he’s been for the past 18 months. The shop specializes in leveraging cultural moments at lightning speed, and Baliga said the pace—and the lack of bureaucracy—were inspiring.

“It was structured unconventionally. We were a very small, nimble group of people with, to some extent, shared sensibilities and taste,” he said. “The thinking was, let's be faster. The time from thought to execution—how do you shrink that? Jeff has a phrase, which actually could work well at Max Effort, which is, ‘Making is thinking.’ In this industry, it takes a tremendously long time to make stuff. But kids make stuff so easy and quick. Why shouldn't we?”

The power of openness

Baliga starts at Tombras on June 5. He will be based in New York, where Tombras currently has about 25 employees, and will be tasked with growing the agency's presence in the city. He will collaborate with Benjamin, who’s in Knoxville, Tombras' largest office with 300 employees. It also has 50 in Atlanta and about 90 working fully remote.

Read more: Creative momentum continues at Tombras

“I think for every creative, the dream is to find a place that’s coming up,” Baliga said. “Knoxville already has it. It's been around for a long time. But New York feels like that opportunity. In my career I’ve worked at places where I wished I’d joined two years earlier. With Tombras, it feels I found it at the right time. It’s in the process of being made. Selfishly, I'd love to contribute to the making of that.”

Benjamin said another of Baliga’s strengths is simply his openness and willingness to experiment.

“You have to be open these days,” Benjamin said. “Open to the thought that this social brief could be the biggest idea of 2023. Open to the idea that a computer could be as creative as you. Open to new ways of doing production. Not all creators are that way. But leaders, especially, have to be that way because the qualities they have are the ones everybody else starts to adopt.” 

“Avi is the new prototype of what you dream of an ECD being,” added Tombras. “We’ve left the paradigm of the once-a-year, X-million-dollar Super Bowl production. Avi helped create the new model at Maximum Effort, and look at what they do—they're doing incredible productions with speed and agility for $150,000. That's where things are going. With the proliferation of platforms like TikTok, the pendulum is not going to swing back to fewer, bigger spots.” 

Benjamin said Baliga’s other strength is simple, too—his love of advertising.

“I left advertising for a year—it was that whole ‘I’m too creative for marketing’ thing,” Benjamin said. “But then it was like, wait a second, I love advertising. I’ve got to go back. As I was talking to Avi, it was like, we don’t have to do these other things. We can make ads—really creative, fun ads. And that joy and appreciation and vision for finding creativity and big thinking in ads was exciting to me.”

Baliga’s arrival comes a year after Tombras hired Maggie Jennings, a 17-year Wieden+Kennedy vet, as chief growth officer and Juan Tubert, an R/GA alum, as chief technology officer—both new positions. A year before that, the agency added Anomaly veteran Chad Hopenwasser as chief production officer.

In 2022, the agency added clients including Kettle Chips, PODS, Sweethearts Candy and Pernod Ricard's Chivas Regal to its roster. Other clients include Subway and Orangetheory Fitness.