Campaign’s Creative Faces to Watch 2022 – Junior Gonzalez, Creative Strategist, Imagination Middle East
Age: 27
Adel Noueihed, Regional Managing Director, Imagination Middle East, Imagination Middle East: There is a reason I hired Junior, almost immediately after first meeting him. There is also a reason I put him forward and subsequently rehired him again after I moved agencies.
Junior has a natural tenacity for cross-platform thinking, research and finding unique strategic insights. But also, coming from a design background means he also understands how to turn those insights into a creative narrative and strategy that allows the wider design teams to understand it – and ultimately then do what they do best.
Equally at home creating audience personas, user journeys or high-level destination strategies, he has proven time and time again that he can turn his hand to any client genre, whether that is telco, sports, luxury or government clients.
We often talk about unicorns in this industry, but his passion and personality combined to have an immediate impact. When he joined Imagination as our first full-time strategist in the Dubai office he was given the freedom to finally own the discipline, working in collaboration with the London strategy team.
The success he has helped achieve in such a short time has already led to the hires of additional strategists as we evolve into more destination and consultancy led work. It’s been no surprise to me, but the impact he has had on the wider office has also been a pleasure to witness and feels like he has been part of the imagination family for much longer than he actually has.
Overall, I have thoroughly enjoyed watching Junior’s progression from a talented graphic designer into a hybrid creative strategist and then working with him as moved into an out and out strategy role.
Professionally he is one of the best strategists I have ever worked with and has an amazing career ahead of him. That said, the best part is that personally, he is also one of the nicest people I have had the pleasure to work with.
Career highlights
Junior began his career with McCann Worldgroup Barcelona also having short stints at CERN in Geneva as an experience and design consultant. He designed and brought to life several experiential jobs for multiple high-profile international brands, such as Uber, Adidas, Ericsson and LaLiga, and regional clients ranging from investment and economic institutions to world-leading energy and transformation companies, such as Saudi Aramco, First Abu Dhabi Bank, Expo 2020 Dubai, MiSK Foundation and Abu Dhabi Global Markets.
Guiding principles
Junior is a versatile strategist and overall creative that shows a keen mind for applications in a real-life sense, coupling an affinity for holistic experiences with visually striking user journeys. Intensely curious about creativity in general, he is a firm believer in the power of connecting to the right stakeholders at the right time, be it through strategy, experience or design. A defender of customer-centric approaches.
Side hustle
An extremely quick-witted, insightful and humorous person. His love for dogs, films, and crypto is matched only by his ability to morph and adapt to any situation/project that is thrown his way.
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