Nicolina Jennings and the talent hiding in plain sight

An advertising campaign ends with a message. Its credits tell another story: dozens of people, each responsible for a different part of making that message happen. Nicolina Jennings appears in those credits as an account director and a managing director. Later, at Working Not Working, she helped build a product around the people themselves. The move gives her career an interesting shape. First came the work of bringing creative teams together for brands. Then came the question of how companies recognize the capabilities of people already on their payroll.

Jennings is now Chief of Staff, Office of the CEO, North America at dentsu, and is based in South Orange, New Jersey. Her earlier work supplies the more detailed chapters: basketball campaigns, an excursion into the internet of 1998, a creative talent community and a directory intended to reveal what an ordinary company directory leaves out.

An account director in the basketball credits

In 2019, ESPN x NBA’s “You Seeing This?” received a Gold award in Social Media at Clio Sports. The entrant was R/GA. Jennings was its group account director. Beside her name sit creative directors, a design director, producers, strategists and account colleagues, along with ESPN’s marketing team and media agency Starcom.

The credit list gives a useful sense of the company she kept professionally. David DeCheser and Isaac Silverglate were group executive creative directors. Marie Ronn was group creative director. Lauren Starr was account director. This was a collective effort, with Jennings holding an account leadership role within it.

There is a temptation, when writing about advertising, to let the trophy do all the explaining. Here the roster is equally interesting. The award belongs to work made across disciplines and organizations. Jennings’s place in that roster is a concrete starting point for understanding her career: creative work reaching the public through the contributions of many people.

A Christmas variety show, with ankle breakers

Another 2019 project put that sort of collaboration to festive use. ESPN and ABC’s “Christmasketball” campaign borrowed from the Christmas variety show, the television format in which music, sketches and celebrity appearances once shared the same evening. Developed with R/GA, it promoted Christmas Day NBA coverage.

John Legend starred alongside ESPN personalities including Rachel Nichols, Maria Taylor, Jalen Rose and Jay Williams. Live and recorded material was scheduled to appear during breaks across twelve hours of games and other programming. It was a fairly literal marriage of entertainment and sport: carols on one side of the commercial break, basketball on the other.

Jennings again received a group account director credit. The team included strategy, creative, design, production, animation, sound and product management. A holiday television concept had to become a sequence of things that could actually air. The credits show how many specialties that required. Even Christmas cheer, it turns out, needs a production department.

A browser trip to 1998

House of ’98 took a different route into basketball culture. Built by R/GA for ESPN around the ten-part documentary series The Last Dance, the web experience returned visitors to the era of Michael Jordan and the 1998 Chicago Bulls.

The date shaped the product. Its graphic design and functionality were set in 1998, with ESPN archival material, music and video from the period. The experience extended the documentary beyond its episodes, giving fans something to explore before, during and after watching. Nostalgia became an interface rather than merely a subject.

Jennings’s credit here was managing director. The project received a Bronze Cube at the 2021 ADC Awards for Craft in Online / Mobile / Content Strategy. Its team combined design, technology, editorial, strategy and production. The finished experience offered a small demonstration of how a familiar story can acquire another life when different kinds of expertise meet.

Who gets to be called creative?

By the time Jennings served on the ADC103 Brand / Communication Design Jury in 2024, her title was VP, Managing Director at Working Not Working. Her agency background included R/GA, Translation and Digitas. Across that career, she had led multidisciplinary teams on campaigns and products for brands including ESPN, Google, Nike and American Express.

That combination matters to the story. A managing director who has worked alongside designers and strategists has seen creative work from a different position than the person making the final image. The titles describe different responsibilities within the same undertaking. A campaign needs both an idea and a way to get it made.

Her jury appointment also put her on the judging side of the industry’s work. The Brand / Communication Design jury brought together people from agencies, studios and brand organizations. For Jennings, it was another setting in which the work of creative teams was considered as a finished result, after the meetings, decisions and revisions had disappeared from view.

A directory with room for the person

Working Not Working launched NTRNL on November 1, 2023. The product let employees show their portfolios, skills and interests inside their own organization, making expertise searchable across locations and roles. Jennings, then managing director, described retention as the reason for building it.

“We set out to create a product that addresses retention by putting the people first.”

Nicolina Jennings, at the NTRNL launch

Wieden+Kennedy was the first official launch partner. It called its version the Spore Directory and had begun rolling it out across its global offices that August. The launch announcement described a workforce of 1,800 employees gaining another way to connect and discover one another’s capabilities.

The name Spore Directory adds a pleasingly organic touch to a software product. The practical proposition was straightforward: a company could search the talent it already employed. An interest that had never appeared in someone’s everyday assignment could become relevant to a new project. For an executive whose résumé included multidisciplinary campaigns, the project brought the business of assembling teams into the foreground.

The people on the other side of the brief

Jennings’s public conversations at Working Not Working continued that concern with opportunity. In July 2024, she joined co-founder Justin Gignac on Pilar Orti’s 21st Century Work Life podcast. They discussed creative hiring, the company’s evolution and NTRNL.

The conversation considered how professionals present multiple skills, and how employers might see potential beyond a narrow description of experience. It also examined internal opportunities and ways for employees to express interest in them. These are questions of access as much as organization: who can see the assignment, and who gets to put a hand up?

The distinction is useful. A portfolio records completed work. An expression of interest points toward something a person wants to attempt. Putting both within reach of a company gives a manager another kind of information when considering a team. That is the logic running through this chapter of Jennings’s career, linking the search for creative people with the chances available to them after joining.

Her working relationships offer a smaller, more personal example of how she describes talent. In a public recommendation for strategist Susana Rivera, Jennings praised the fresh perspective Rivera brought to their work together on Nike and ESPN. She pointed to insightful observations that could inspire creative work and to Rivera’s ability to captivate a room.

The recommendation is specific about contribution. It identifies what a colleague does that helps the people around her. Read alongside Jennings’s campaign credits, it reveals another way to understand the same teams: through the judgment of someone who worked with them. A name on a roster becomes a person with a recognizable way of working.

Less structure, more vibes

Jennings also participated in HR Brew’s “Inside #QuitTok: The Real Reasons Employees Leave,” an event focused on career development and employee departures. The speaker lineup included Gignac, talent and DEI consultant Daniela Herrera, and Adrienne Wright Cleveland, The Martin Agency’s chief operating and culture officer.

The event framed departures as something leaders needed to understand from employees’ perspectives. Its discussion connected professional development with recruitment culture, bringing Jennings’s product work into a conversation about the everyday experience of being employed.

There was room for levity. When Gignac talked about the atmosphere a company creates, Jennings responded: “I love that - less structure, more vibes.” It is a compact line, particularly from someone whose career includes the distinctly structured business of account leadership. The appeal lies in its informality. A discussion of workplace culture briefly sounded like people talking to one another, rather than a committee naming a new initiative.

A different seat at dentsu

At dentsu, Jennings’s current title places her in the office of the CEO for North America. It adds another organizational setting to a career that has already included agency leadership and a creative talent platform. The through line is visible in the work she has taken part in: teams making campaigns, a community connecting talent, and a product designed to reveal capabilities within companies.

Her story is especially interesting when read through those projects. The basketball campaign and the internal directory serve different purposes, but both depend on bringing people and opportunity together. One produces something an audience can watch or explore. The other tries to help an organization discover who might contribute to what comes next.

A job title is necessary shorthand. Jennings’s career supplies a reminder of how much activity sits behind it. Read the credits, follow the projects, listen to the conversations. The person begins to come into view.