We are a full-service brand development agency. We partner deeply with great clients, pushing creative boundaries to shape all parts of the consumer experience.
Established: 1996
Location: Austin, TX
Employees: 150
Post Date: 4/1/2014
Joel Clement, who has worked as both an art director and copywriter in a career that has spanned half the globe, is calling Austin and McGarrah Jessee his new home, where he will focus primarily on writing.
“We’re fortunate to find someone with the depth and breadth of experience and talent that Joel brings,” said agency co-founder Mark McGarrah. “We don’t care how far we have to go to find people like him.”
Joel comes to McJ after eight years with Saatchi & Saatchi in Bangkok, where he served as Executive Creative Director as well as Regional Creative Director for all of Saatchi & Saatchi Asia, which includes offices in Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, India and Singapore. While at Saatchi Joel worked on brands such as Guinness, Electrolux and Procter & Gamble.
In addition to advertising, Joel has also studied architecture, using those skills as part of the team that redesigned the Saatchi & Saatchi office in Bangkok into a much talked-about and highly collaborative space. He’ll find those talents welcome at McGarrah Jessee, which recently restored a 1950s bank building into their mid-century modern Austin headquarters.
Before returning to the U.S., Joel considered a number of options. “Repatriating to the US I had a pretty specific ideal in mind,” he said. “I wanted to be part of an independent shop for the creative license it would afford, and I wanted to be part of an agency with a strong positive culture. I found it all at McGarrah Jessee.”
Other stops in Joel’s career include two stints with San Francisco’s Goodby Silverstein & Partners, from 1997–2000 and again from 2002–2003, working on Nike and HP, for whom he won the $100,000 Athena Award and Campaign of the Year from Creativity.
In between he was back in Asia, with BBH in Singapore, Ogilvy & Mather in Bangkok, where he won Asia’s only Cannes Lion in 2000 (one of eight Lions he’s helped land), and TBWA\Thailand, where he worked with P’Thor, the Godfather of Thai advertising.
Joel began his advertising career at DeVito/Verdi in New York and also spent time in Minneapolis at both Carmichael Lynch and Fallon.
