Andre Filip keeps changing the assignment

Andre Filip’s old working day could begin with a children’s movie, turn to horror at lunchtime and finish with a drama. The moods changed. The deadline generally declined to cooperate. At Seiniger Advertising, where he entered the business as an intern, switching emotional registers was part of learning the job. Waiting to feel inspired would have made for a rather expensive afternoon.

Later, conversations with colleagues in general advertising exposed an odd difference. They had weeks for work that his world measured in days. Filip saw a business opportunity in that discrepancy. In 2004, he founded ELA, short for Everything LA, to carry entertainment’s speed and storytelling into the wider brand business. His first entrepreneurial insight was, in effect, a disagreement with the calendar.

More than twenty years later, another boundary came up for revision. In March 2025, ELA began transitioning into SmartMagic, with Filip and merchandising executive Grant Barth bringing their experience together. The new proposition reached into products and merchandise as well as advertising. Filip’s career has a recurring question running through it: why accept the assignment exactly as it arrives?

A borrowed apprenticeship, an original business

Tony Seiniger gave Filip his early education in the craft. Filip has credited the agency founder with taking time to teach him and opening his eyes to what accomplished creative work could look like. Asking for an internship made him an easier person to take a chance on. He wanted proximity to people whose work he respected before he had much work of his own to show.

That apprenticeship helps explain the particular business he eventually built. Entertainment advertising requires an audience to understand a promise quickly. A poster has little room for hesitation. A trailer needs to establish a world, make a viewer care and leave something unresolved. Those disciplines travel well beyond cinema, even when the client sells something considerably less dramatic than a summer blockbuster.

Filip’s early campaign experience included studios and entertainment brands such as HBO, Paramount, Universal, Disney and Showtime. His public biography places business leadership alongside creative thinking. The combination matters: a founder selling speed must also organize the people who make that promise possible. Otherwise, the agency has merely acquired an attractive adjective and a difficult staffing problem.

The founder who also made the T-shirts

Advertising was not Filip’s only experiment in building an identity. In 2009, he started ContraBrand with T-shirts. A July 2010 announcement described plans for a broader clothing and accessories range, along with distributors in markets including China, Korea, Australia and Germany. The customer he imagined wanted clothing that expressed individuality rather than membership in one prescribed scene.

The proposed range was ambitious: hoodies, sweaters, sweats, underwear and accessories, with a women’s line as well. It was a practical excursion into the problem that advertising usually encounters after somebody else has made the product. A label needs an audience, a point of view and things people can actually buy. A good slogan cannot perform the duties of a wardrobe.

ContraBrand adds an interesting detail to the later SmartMagic chapter. Filip had already stood on the product side of the counter. The historical announcement does not establish where every expansion plan ended up, but it does show the breadth of his appetite. He was willing to put his ideas about identity onto something with sleeves, a size and a price.

Chaos, with somewhere to sit

ELA’s philosophy gave questioning a prominent place in the working day. Filip described an agency willing to take apart a brief or an established business assumption to see what a better answer might require. He called its approach “humble disruption.” The humility is the useful part of that phrase. Breaking things is easy; admitting that your own first answer needs breaking takes more effort.

His version of Los Angeles was specific enough to come with an itinerary. For a visiting friend, he suggested Mastro’s in Beverly Hills, lunch at Joan’s on Third, a Santa Monica sunset and a stroll through Melrose’s shops. It is a portrait of the city through meals, streets and company. Everything LA was a business name, but the geography plainly had personal appeal.

The offices made the working philosophy physical. Filip and executive creative director Carlos Musquez were involved in selecting and planning ELA’s Hollywood space, a renovation completed in November 2018. The 4,300-square-foot workplace combined places to gather with enclosed rooms. Creative collaboration needs conversation; occasionally, it also needs a door that closes.

The detailing had a sense of theatre. Filip’s office placed a black granite desk over a metallic blue splattered cowhide rug. Exposed brick, timber, industrial windows and mezzanines gave the broader space its character. There was also room for creative production. The brief was to accommodate how the agency worked, with enough visual provocation to keep the surroundings from feeling like a waiting room.

In September 2019, ELA announced its Irvine office, designed with Gensler. Its features included plants, natural materials and an Italian moss wall. More revealing than the finishes was a working habit: projects appeared on the walls while they were still being developed. The office made room for a shared view of unfinished thinking, rather than leaving every idea trapped in its owner’s screen.

Filip connected the expansion to serving clients such as Thermador and Western Digital, alongside the agency’s entertainment and cultural work. The address helped bring different kinds of businesses into the same practice. His original idea depended on that crossing of categories. An agency trained in entertainment could carry its methods into another commercial setting without requiring the client to become a movie studio.

Speed has a surprisingly patient side

For someone whose founding proposition involved faster execution, Filip’s account of productivity is strikingly concerned with preparation. He has described days with thirty to fifty projects moving through the agency. At that volume, enthusiasm alone becomes a poor filing system. Someone has to know who owns each assignment, what the other people are doing and where the next decision belongs.

His argument allows for an apparently inconvenient possibility: adding a step can make the work faster. A preliminary discussion or a clearer plan can prevent confusion during execution. He also wants people to understand the larger goal, rather than complete an isolated task without knowing why it matters. The person left out of a conversation may be the one who notices its missing piece.

That is an appealing complication in his story. The founder who spotted a shorter timetable also describes the conversations needed to make it feasible. His advice to entrepreneurs elsewhere has included trusting employees with operations so the founder can concentrate on growth. A business cannot become quicker if every question has to queue outside one person’s office.

The logo has to earn its new clothes

Sandisk offers a concrete example of the creative work. Its account of its new identity, published in March 2025, names ELA as the outside agency collaborating with the internal team. The design drew on the pixel, kept a connection to the company’s typographic past and adjusted its familiar red. Reinvention still needed to leave the business recognizable.

Filip described the ambition with a compact line: “If the future had a logo, it might look like the new Sandisk mark.” His explanation tied the lettering to flash technology and the ways people use data. The useful detail is the link between a visual decision and the client’s business. The shape needs a reason to exist beyond looking different on presentation day.

His earlier discussion of branding made room for variation across channels. A brand’s voice need not appear identically in every setting to remain coherent. The challenge is to preserve a recognizable relationship between the parts. Anyone who has worn formal shoes to the beach can appreciate the distinction between having an identity and insisting on one outfit for every occasion.

“If we knew what we would find, we wouldn’t go through the process.”

Andre Filip, on creative exploration

A bigger piece of the assignment

SmartMagic brings that interest in the whole business into its structure. Barth’s background includes merchandising leadership at Levi Strauss & Co. and apparel leadership at Nike. Together, their experience connects the making and positioning of products with the campaigns that introduce them. The launch described a combination of strategic thinking, merchandising, design and advertising.

The company’s own launch announcement named more than forty strategists and creatives, with clients including Sandisk, Bosch, Jimmy Choo, Starbucks and Thermador. Those were launch claims, a snapshot of the business at its introduction. Its current team page identifies Filip as founder and CEO and Barth as president and chief strategy officer. The old ELA biography now belongs within a longer story.

What Filip appears to keep carrying forward is a preference for getting closer to the underlying problem. First, he questioned how long the work should take. He experimented with a clothing label, helped shape rooms where people could develop ideas together, and built an agency that crossed client categories. Now his company’s offer reaches further into what a brand makes. The deadline remains. The assignment keeps getting more interesting.