OUR PEOPLE

On every project, we constitute a totally specific and dedicated group of extraordinary planners, documentary videographers, copywriters, art directors, plus ad hoc experts (semioticians, anthropologists, etc...), so that we can adapt the team to the project requirement uniquely. Of course, we also take into account the geography of the project, to have access to first hand understanding of the markets we need to include. Still, we have a core team, our partners around the world. Not only do they have flabbergasting competence and intelligence, but also they are nice enough for us to call them friends!

Christophe Abensour

Christophe Abensour is a French citizen; he was born in New Zealand which makes him a man of two hemispheres. Christophe is an “agrégé de philosophie” and MA in Political Science. He was a teacher of philosophy before pursuing a career in advertising: he worked in strategic planning and management with Saatchis, Lowe, Bates, O&M, and BBDO. Advertising made him a world pedestrian, working and living in Paris, London, Chicago, Moscow, and Barcelona. In 2001, he created Abensour & Partners to conduct brand projects for Toyota, L’Oréal, Mars, Heineken, Esthederm Group, Nestlé, SNCF and Unilever. At dinner parties Christophe annoys everyone with his urge to talk about cultural exploration and documentaries. He still has one or two friends left.

April Wong

April is a millennial marketer and a big fan of growth hacker marketing, design thinking and big data. She has over 12 years of experience in advertising agencies like Saatchi & Saatchi, Ogilvy One, TBWA and McCann. Accounts she has worked on include P&G, Nivea, Nestlé, Cathay Pacific & Shangri-La, etc. She is specialized in branding, marketing, communication and market research in the Greater China region. Passionate about innovation, April has established “The Frame Shop” platform in 2017. The platform pulls experienced independent creative and specialists from different areas together to carry out innovation or branding projects with a speed, reactivity, cost effectiveness and enthusiasm that only ad hoc teams can provide.

Mariette Darrigrand

Mariette is a  semiologist; she has an obsessive interest for language, any language. She hunts words like others hunt butterflies, in social media, in news magazines, in TV series, in political discourses, in celebrities’ interviews, in popular novels… Her core belief is that our society cannot be understood without decoding the signs that are produced everyday, everywhere. They contain our dreams, our needs, our wants, our barriers, and our fertile contradictions. And also our cultural specificities. Mariette has a weekly segment on France Inter public radio, and is a regular speaker on French TV. She is the author, among other books, of “Ces mots qui nous gouvernent” (“The words that govern us”) – Bayard – 2008. “Comment les media nous parlent -mal” (how do media talk to us – badly) – Ed. François Bourin – 2014, and of “J’te kiffe / Je t’aime” – folio-Gallimard – 2017, on contemporary romantic vocabulary. Mariette is also a lecturer at Paris 13 University.

Isabelle Sastre

Isabelle worked for ten years in Paris as an artistic director in the most prestigious advertising agencies such as EURO RSCG, BETC, TBWA, Publicis Conseil... She has worked on major national and international brands such as Toyota, Lacoste, Haagen Dazs, Coca-Cola, L'Oréal, BNP, Citroën, Dupont... Isabelle pursues her career as a freelance art director in order to develop graphic design with her own clients (Lux Artists, Vadim Couture Paris, Joe Pytka Production, Disney...) Moving to Los Angeles for 12 years, she developed artistic photography. She has exhibited in the United States and Paris. Back in France since 2018, she continues to work as a freelancer for prestigious advertising agencies, or for her clients, while exploring her art, which has opened up to different media such as tapestry (Manufacture des Gobelins training) and digital art. Working in the 3 universes, advertising, graphic design and artistic creation, alternating for 20 years, allows her to feed her creative spirit and expand her horizons permanently.

Leandro Badalotti

Cinematographer and editor, Leandro was born in Southern Brazil where he produced and edited two feature documentary films, New Immigrants and Volume 1 – Loud and Clear, chosen by the Brazilian Culture Fund and premiered on public television. Leandro moved to New York in 2010 where he produced a series of web videos for Magnum. At MediaStorm he contributed as associate producer on several award winning projects, including Emmy nominee A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan. For the International Committee of the Red Cross, Leandro shot and produced in Yemen the award winning short documentary, I Know Where I’m Going. Leandro also edited and co-produced award winning feature documentary Thao’s Library. The film premiered in AMC Theatres and is available on Netflix.

Macha Tsarenkov

Macha is a French and Russian filmmaker. She discovered the world of filmmaking in NYC where she lived for 9 years before settling back to her hometown of Paris in 2020. She started by producing music videos for world reknown musicians such as the Avalanches, Bomba Estereo, Joji, Charlotte Gainsbourg among others. She has been working since as an editor and videographer for the Gagosian and Perrotin Galleries, La Fondation Cartier, La Bourse du Commerce - Collection Pinault, Coca-Cola, Stellantis, the French Biodiversity Office among others. In 2016 she directed her first short doc on an Iranian painter and musician in exile and has since been interested in documenting the lives of underrepresented communities and highlighting the destiny of people who left their places of origin. She directed Beautiful Struggle a film following the journeys of immigrant artists in NYC, who was selected in festivals worldwide.

Coco Videla

Coco is a strategist and producer based in New York. She hails from the sunniest city in Venezuela, which accounts for her perennial optimism. Coco has worked for agencies across the WPP and Publicis networks for more than 14 years, heading strategy for a number of renowned brands. In 2013, she started The Village, a collective of creative minds and award winning documentarians, with the vision to create powerful human interest stories that provoke critical thinking. She believes marketers and entertainers hold the power to change the world through the stories they tell, and she intends to use this power responsibly.

Tom Hunter

Tom Hunter is a researcher who combines right and left-brain thinking. The former was honed at the customer agency C Space, where he conducted brand projects for Danone, Nestle, Virgin Media and British Airways. The latter was refined at the Open Data Institute where he helped governments around the world use data more effectively for better decisions, faster innovation, and more transparent public procurement. He is a PHD candidate at the LSE, where his research focuses on democratic legitimacy (or lack thereof) in the European Union. A friend once described him as “the truly bicultural person I know” (clearly he hadn’t met Christophe), a perspective that informs his work at Abensour & Partners.

Evelyne Cohen Lemoine 

Strategic consultant, Evelyn is a specialist of change management and organisational transformation projects. « Normalienne in Physics », she was influenced from an early age by a family background in science and physics (her uncle is Nobel Prize winner Claude Cohen-Tannoudji), with a particular passion for connecting scientific knowledge with human and civilizational challenges. After her studies, Evelyne worked as a strategic planner for advertising agencies, where she met Christophe Abensour, and then specialised in transformation management, professional coaching and managerial development. In this capacity, she has worked for public administrations, banks, insurance companies, hospitals, industrial corporations, NGOs, IT companies, telecoms, and the luxury sector. Her particular focus is to promote change and transformation through the empowerment of individuals, because she believes that the search for meaningfulness is the most powerful motivation to change and evolve.

Miquel Mas

Miquel is an ad agency veteran, who has developed almost his entire career at BBDO and Proximity, holding both executive and business development responsabilities. He has been working for clients such as PepsiCo, Nestle, Renault, Sony, Allianz, Henkel or Danone, among others, looking for growth opportunities and helping them to accelerate innovation. This has given him a broad perspective on the impact that digital revolution is having in the way people relate to brands, and its consequences in commercial communications and the advertising & marketing industry. His present focus is in brand direction and curation: finding a meaningful position for brands in 21^st century fast changing society, that gives them a clear purpose, and makes them resonate in popular culture. Miquel was born and is based in Barcelona. He is a graduate in Advertising and PR, and  has a PDG Executive Program at IESE Business School and a Post-Graduate at Omnicom University in Boston.