JWT's Lucas Peon joins as ECD

The Gate London, the award-winning creative and media company, has hired Lucas Peon, the Executive Creative Director of JWT (now Wunderman Thompson), as its new Executive Creative Director.

Peon will join The Gate in December and form part of the management team alongside Chief Executive Jamie Elliott and Chief Strategy Office Kit Altin. His arrival follows the planned relocation of Beri Cheetham to the US, where he will spearhead a new role within the MSQ family.

Peon’s brief is to further boost The Gate’s creative output, helping it to become the best at blending creative and media thinking in the UK. He will build on the company’s ‘Boundless’ mindset, offering unique perspective as the market seeks independent and nimble alternatives to the faltering network and holding companies.

A highly experienced and awarded creative leader, Peon started as a film director in Argentina. He took his first agency role in 1999, and later became the Chief Creative Officer of WPP’s global digital agency Possible, first in the United States and then in London. During his time at Possible he helped secure a number of notable new business wins and created award-winning work for the likes of Peroni, Danone and Procter & Gamble.

In February 2016 Peon joined JWT London, initially as its Digital Executive Creative Director. He was promoted to Executive Creative Director a year later, and during his tenure the agency became one of the top 3 most awarded UK creative agencies at Cannes and finished 4th in the Gunn Report UK.

Under his guidance, JWT also generated business-changing campaigns such as We Are Not An Island for HSBC UK and Make The Future for Shell, as well as hard-hitting work such as The Not So Beautiful Game for the NCDV and The Humanity Test for UN Women.

Jamie Elliott, Chief Executive of The Gate London, said: “Kit and I are thrilled that Lucas is going to lead the next phase of our transformation journey. He is a world-class, progressive creative leader who understands the possibilities in the modern landscape more than most. He is the perfect partner to take our creative & media proposition to the next level.”

Lucas Peon said: “I’ve been impressed with the clarity of vision from Kit and Jamie, their appetite for breakthrough ideas and the ambition of the agency. The opportunity to concentrate on delivering brave, meaningful, talked-about work with a winning team that is genuinely focused on doing things differently, was hard to resist.”

Peter Reid, the Chief Executive of MSQ, said: “I’m delighted to welcome Lucas to the MSQ fold. It’s great to see yet more talent excited to join the group, and his arrival is testament to the way that Jamie, Kit and Beri have grown The Gate over the past two-and-a-half years.”

The Gate currently creates breakthrough work for clients including Organix, The Electoral Commission, UK Export Finance, Chiltern Railways, Church & Dwight, Canal & River Trust and many more. In 2018 it was named Oystercatchers’ Small Agency of the Year.