Dentsu recruits Gabriel Tamborini to lead design and product lab

Having formed last year, Dentsu’s merged creative wing Dentsu Creative continues to bolster its local leadership ranks, bringing in Gabriel Tamborini to lead a new experience design and product lab.

Former Cognizant design and experience head Gabriel Tamborini has been named as Dentsu Creative’s new chief experience and product officer, once again following in the footsteps of recently-installed Denstu A/NZ boss Patricio De Matteis.

In what is a newly created role, Tamborini will lead the formation of an experience design and product lab within Dentsu, which brings together the firm’s creative and experience design teams.

“Dentsu Creative is designed to not only help our partners transform their communications through creativity, but also transform their business,” commented Dentsu Creative A/NZ chief executive Kirsty Muddle. “Gabe unites creativity and technology to deliver this effectiveness, and at Dentsu Creative he will lead a team of conceptual thinkers, innovation strategists, technologists and experience designers to connect with the scale of our CXM business.”

Tamborini has been with Cognizant for the past two and a half years, during which time De Matteis served as the firm’s digital lead, with both having crossed from PwC in Sydney, where De Matteis was digital lead and Tamborini experience design director. Prior to joining PwC, Tamborini spent eight years between Accenture acquisitions Fjord and Reactive – De Matteis having helped build Accenture Interactive’s regional arm over the course of fifteen years.

“I’m thrilled to be joining Dentsu Creative,” Tamborini said of his appointment. “Technology has fundamentally transformed how brands engage with customers and employees, so it has become more important than ever to use the power of creativity and design to innovate the way brands deliver experiences. I’m excited to be working in a business that has creativity at its core and look forward to working with this talented team.”

The creative arm of Dentsu

Dentsu Creative was launched last year as part of an extensive brand and organisational streamlining project at the firm, merging a number of creative and comms agencies including DentsuMB, 360i and Isobar, and locally Haystac and Cox Inall under the single full-service umbrella.

Led by Dentsu International global chief creative officer Fred Levron, the wing is made up of 9,000 creative professionals operating across 46 markets worldwide.

“The modern world is more complex to navigate than ever for brands and businesses,” Muddle said at the time. “We need to simplify our business to break down agency silos and seamlessly connect our talent around the right client opportunities at the right time. By integrating our teams, clients now have access to the minds of 45,000 brilliant people, bringing diverse backgrounds from across the entire network to solve a problem and deliver new ideas.”

Meanwhile, Tamborini arrives at Dentsu shortly after the appointment of former Deloitte Digital director Adam Burnell as Technology Transformation Partner for A/NZ, a role focused on driving regional and global technology strategy and business growth across the region. Based out of Melbourne, Burnell has been with Deloitte for the past five years, prior to which he was a director of digital products & emerging technologies at CHE Proximity.