Alberto
Ponte

about the jury

Alberto Ponte was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina where he lived and worked until 2003. 

In 2004 a call from Dan Wieden made Alberto move to Portland, Oregon, where he started working at Wieden + Kennedy for the Nike brand. 

During the years prior to that call, he started his career as a copywriter, making communications for the newspaper, El Cronista, then at Young & Rubicam Buenos Aires and Agulla & Baccetti, the two most creative shops of the country at that time. 

He won national and international awards for brands like Visa, Yellow Pages, Tulipan, Apertura Business Magazine, Heineken, Molinos Rio de la Plata, and the TV channel 13, Telecom, and Coca Cola. 

At W+K, Alberto stepped down from his CD title at his previous agencies to start as a copywriter for Nike Latin America and the US markets. 

After a couple of years of working as a writer and learning the culture and the language, he became a CD for Nike Latin America, then a CD for Nike US and finally in 2007 Alberto Ponte became the Global CD for all of the Nike categories at W+K. After the first two years, he started partnering with Ryan O’Rourke. 

Together, they CD’ed and also created work for the brand’s most iconic athletes, and moments during the last two decades. 

The Global CD role was not only to create their own work and help teams create theirs at the Portland office, but it also meant working with teams in the rest of W+K offices around the world, like NYC, London, Amsterdam, Delhi, São Paulo, Shanghai, and Tokyo. They also directed them and won the Nike business in India and Brazil. 

Their work in the United States has been recognized multiple times by the Emmys, Cannes, D&AD, The One Show, Art Directors Club, The Effies, Entertainment Weekly Magazine, Time Magazine, ESPN SportsCenter, The New York Times, Family Guy and South Park. Ryan and Alberto were named Creative Directors of the Year by Ad Age magazine in 2019 for their work on Nike. 

In 2023, Ryan, Danny, and Alberto decided to put all of their past learning to use and to start their own shop. Somebody called it a very experienced start up, and they liked the sound of that.