Profile

Taras Wayner
Executive Creative Director
R/GA

As executive creative director, Taras sets the creative direction on the Verizon account, covering online advertising, website, retail, experiential and other marketing initiatives for all lines of business.

Taras has an impressive track record as a brand storyteller with more than 18 years of experience in advertising. Prior to joining R/GA, he was at Berlin Cameron United, where he first began to tackle the challenge of developing fully realized brand expressions online. As creative leader on the agency’s Samsung business, he developed the “Imagine” campaign, a global, integrated brand initiative that launched in 2004 and is still being implemented across Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

Before joining Berlin Cameron United, Taras was a creative director at Young & Rubicam, leading initiatives for Sony and the NFL. His NFL work included a successful TV campaign to promote the playoffs, after years of declining ratings. Featuring actor Don Cheadle (Hotel Rwanda, Crash, Ocean’s 11), the spots represented a major shift in how the NFL markets itself. Rather than rely on game clips and rah-rah music, the campaign celebrated the fan and connected with the audience on a more direct, emotional level. The ads helped to generate record-high ratings for the league and won a Silver Lion at Cannes.

Previously, Taras worked at Cliff Freeman & Partners, creating work for Coca-Cola, Fanta, Staples, Church’s Chicken, and FOX Sports. Honored with a Grand Prix at Cannes and inclusion in the Clio Hall of Fame, a campaign highlighting FOX Sports’ local programming ran for more than six months and contributed to the successful launch of the FOX Sports Net cable channel. The series of five humorous TV spots depicted bizarre, and completely fictional, sporting events from the far corners of the world, such as Chinese tree catching and Turkish dry-river-bed cliff diving.

To date, Taras’s work has earned him 12 Clios, 4 One Show Pencils, 8 Art Directors Cubes, a D&AD Pencil, and 5 Cannes Lions, including the Cannes Grand Prix.

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