• by Fern Siegel , December 18, 2023

Denise Zurilgen and Lauren Costa have rejoined Ogilvy as global executive creative directors on the IBM account.

The pair will drive the client's creative vision as part of EightBar, a global team dedicated to IBM, that includes strategy, creative, media and data analytics across WPP, including Ogilvy and GroupM.

Zurilgen cited the advancements of AI as a reason to return to the agency.

Zurilgen and Costa first met in 2012, while working on IBM at Ogilvy. They contributed to "Made with IBM," an Effie-award winning series of 62 spots, running one time only during The Masters.

Since then, they have held creative posts at Droga5, working together on Chase, Dixie and Xfinity. Most recently, Costa served as executive creative director at JOAN Creative, while Zurilgen worked as a vice president-creative director at MullenLowe NY. Costa started her career at Wieden+Kennedy NY, while Zurilgen began at TBWA\CHIAT\DAY in Los Angeles.

Liz Taylor, Global Chief Creative Officer at Ogilvy, said: "Technology is being creatively leveraged to drive a new and better future for the world — and IBM is at the center of it all as an innovative leader with an unbeatable heritage."

During their prior Ogilvy tenure, Zurilgen and Costa also contributed to "Datagrams," a mobile-first experience that took US Open tennis data and transformed it beautiful animations, and "A Boy and His Atom," a movie made of actual individual atoms created to highlight the work of IBM's Research Labs.

"The B2B landscape is being shaped by the kind of emotion previously reserved for consumer audiences. At the end of the day, a business doesn’t make a purchasing decision — a person does. They are making a massive financial investment in a service that not only affects their performance and business outcomes, but those of their entire team and company. What’s more emotional than that?" added Zurilgen and Costa.