Lance Jensen was part of the creative inspiration behind a series of 2007 television ads featuring actress Kate Walsh driving a Cadillac sedan over highways and through tunnels. Staring seductively into the camera, she asks, “When you turn your car on, does it return the favor?”
Jensen has since moved on professionally, jumping from a small agency he helped launch to become chief creative officer at Boston advertising giant Hill Holliday two years ago. Now he has won creative control of the Cadillac brand advertising once again, a prized account that landed at Hill Holliday last month.
“We were hoping he’d help us get a car account,” said Karen Kaplan, chief executive of Hill Holliday. She said the agency did not have any particular piece of business or industry in mind when it hired Jensen, but his passion for cars and previous experience certainly did not hurt.
Though Hill Holliday is estimated to generate $185 million in revenue, Cadillac is the agency’s first automotive client since an ill-fated campaign for Infiniti in the early 1990s.
Jensen’s initial Cadillac ad campaign was created at Modernista, an agency that has since closed. This time around, “everything’s different,” he said from his corner office 35 stories above downtown Boston. “It’s a different team on their side, and it’s really, fundamentally different on our side, with the exception of me.”
Jensen has a plenty of experience with car companies. Modernista also produced ads for Hummer and Jensen contributed to earlier ads for Volkswagen when he worked for Arnold Worldwide. He was part of a team that introduced Volkswagen’s “Drivers Wanted” campaign, with its memorable television ads.
“I guess cars are my thing,” he said. But it’s not like I prefer them over something else. It’s just another problem to solve.”
In fact, Jensen’s creative talents are paying off for Hill Holliday in areas well beyond the auto industry, said Chris Wallrapp, the agency’s marketing director and head of new business, who also worked with Jensen at Modernista.
“We’ve won five of our last new business pitches, partially because of what Lance is bringing to the table,” Wallrapp said. Besides Cadillac, that roster of new clients also includes TripAdvisor, the giant travel service website based in Newton.
In addition to its newest clients, Hill Holiday managed to keep creative control over Bank of America’s domestic advertising when the bank recently decided to work on a “repositioning” campaign. The international agency WPP was chosen as the bank’s agency of record.
“The financial services industry had a rather tumultuous ride for a while,” said Anne Finucane, Bank of America’s global strategy and marketing officer. “Lance was pivotal in our decision.”
The new bank campaign, “Life’s better when we’re connected,” launched in April and featured a television spot centering on one family, taking photos over many years. The ad has no words until the end, when a voiceover chimes in. “We know we’re not the center of your life, but we’ll do our best to help you connect to what is.”
As creative director, Jensen oversees all of the creative teams at Hill Holliday, lending ideas and suggestions to others in the firm. On some of the bigger accounts, however, Jensen is involved with the creative direction, and even writes some of the television spots, he said.
His ideas and insights have influenced commercials for products like cars, as well as institutions including Bank of America, Liberty Mutual, and Cigna Corp.
“From a product perspective, at least for me, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s something you eat, or something you wear, or something you drive, or something you use that isn’t a physical product, like a financial instrument,” he said. “There are always human emotions and needs that can be honestly thought about around any of those things.”
Gail Waterhouse can be reached at gail.waterhouse@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter at @gailwaterhouse.