Steph Sebbag and the art of getting a second look

Steph Sebbag went into a London gallery and came out with the beginnings of a business partner. He was in town for a project involving John Keats. His producer, Karla Braun, an art collector, took a walk through Soho with him. They entered The Outsiders Gallery, where Marine Tanguy was working. A detour became a conversation. The conversation acquired an evening appointment, then another meeting the following morning. For a visit ostensibly concerned with a dead poet, it produced a considerable amount of new business.

The next morning’s meeting was at Maison Bertaux. Tanguy brought a first edition of Keats’s poems. Their shared interests included art, a fondness for Prussian blue and the prospect of thinking beyond the next transaction. Sebbag wanted to open a gallery with the right partner. Here was someone with whom he could discuss both the pictures and the purpose of the room that would contain them.

By May 2014, they had opened De Re Gallery in Los Angeles. Sebbag already had an advertising agency, bpg, founded nine years earlier. He would later co-found Casa Del Sol tequila. Seen together, these ventures suggest an enduring interest in how creative work meets an audience. The settings change considerably. The problem of persuading someone to pause remains rather familiar.

A room of their own, named for an island

De Re took its name from Île de Ré, the French island where Tanguy grew up. The partnership linked her experience in London’s gallery world with Sebbag’s work in entertainment advertising and his interests as a collector. Their idea developed further when they met at Art Basel Miami. The eventual destination was Melrose Avenue: a 2,000-square-foot gallery in a city with ample experience of making an entrance.

Its opening proposition put contemporary artists into conversation with established names. Stefanie Schneider, Mike Sagato and sculptor Victor Gingembre were among the artists in the launch material; works by Andy Warhol, Salvador Dalí and others provided a different historical register. The arrangement asked visitors to look across generations. For Sebbag, it also meant taking an interest usually exercised through collecting and giving it a public address.

In a joint interview, the founders described a Los Angeles supported by diverse museums, galleries, private collections and an appetite for cultural events. Their recommended stops included LACMA. They were interested in the use of light and shadow in Gingembre’s sculpture and in Magdalena Fernández’s video work. Those are specific visual enthusiasms, more revealing than a general declaration that art matters.

The gallery also offered a way to bring people into the same room. Its early programming included Art & Jazz, Art & Wine and Art & Film events. In 2016, Sebbag appeared on the host committee for the Eastwood Ranch Foundation’s Art for Animals fundraiser at De Re, alongside figures from entertainment and photography. A gallery could provide an exhibition, a gathering and a practical use for the connections around it.

Before the gallery, the moving picture

Sebbag’s professional trail passes through Razorfish before bpg. His LinkedIn education record lists Western University from 1991 to 1993. By 2005 he was establishing the Los Angeles agency that would become a central part of his advertising career. Its remit covered print, broadcast and interactive work, requiring ideas to survive changes of format as well as changes of client.

The machinery of the business mattered alongside the images. In 2010, Andy Robbins was promoted to a newly created chief operating officer position while retaining responsibility for interactive. Robbins reported to Sebbag. Giving the interactive executive a broader operating role is a useful glimpse of the organization underneath the finished campaigns: someone had to oversee daily work, development and expansion while the creative departments kept producing.

A year later, bpg received PromaxBDA’s North American Creative Agency of the Year recognition. It had 15 wins and 30 nominations at the 2011 conference, with work spanning clients including History, Food Network, Showtime and the US Open. Sebbag accepted the award with his staff. The numbers describe an agency’s output across assignments; the photograph one might imagine from the occasion should leave room for the team.

His credits also extend into production. Rebel Films, which he founded and owned, represented commercial directors. His own assignments included directing the Spectrum SportsNet film welcoming LeBron James to the 2018 Los Angeles Lakers. He could run a business that made advertising, and take a directing credit on the work itself. In a profession fond of titles, those two responsibilities at least have different chairs.

Honey, a rooftop and a suitcase

The National Geographic Explorer promotion from 2016 is a particularly sticky example of bpg’s approach. Host Richard Bacon was doused with three gallons of honey, covered in paint, made to eat bugs and seated in swamp water. Sebbag was the executive creative director; Andy Baker directed. The campaign introduced a presenter through things happening to him. Curiosity acquired a face, and that face had an unusually demanding day.

The Lakers film used another kind of presence. Ice Cube narrated a black-and-white piece marking James’s arrival, filmed from the roof of bpg’s Los Angeles studios. Sebbag held both director and creative director credits. The choice of narrator and location connected the announcement to the city around it. A player’s arrival became an occasion for Los Angeles to speak in a recognizable voice.

Elsewhere in 2018, a bpg spot for the return of Deal or No Deal took Howie Mandel to baggage claim. Robbie Norris directed; Sebbag was creative director. The familiar suitcases of the game found a second home among the luggage of an airport. It is a pleasingly literal setting: a place where people already wait for a case to appear, usually with considerably less financial suspense.

These productions offer different answers to the same creative question: which part of the subject can carry a scene? Bacon’s participation made an introduction; Ice Cube’s narration gave an announcement a local voice; baggage claim supplied a setting for Mandel’s game. Reading the work this way reveals choices about performance and context, without assigning every contributor’s idea to the person at the top of the credits.

The salt girl has possibilities

One small answer in an advertising industry feature gives Sebbag’s taste a comic outline. Asked which brand mascot they would like to take over their social accounts, Sebbag and Robbins chose the Morton Salt Girl. Their explanation imagined encountering her in real life, complete with umbrella, rain and salt. They saw material for stories in a familiar figure that usually stays obediently on the package.

“She’s got soul”

Steph Sebbag and Andy Robbins, on the Morton Salt Girl

The response is appealing because the candidate is so specific. Advertising has no shortage of famous characters available for such an exercise. They picked a girl in the rain and immediately began placing her in the world. It fits the more elaborate campaigns: give the audience something recognizable, then arrange an encounter worth watching. Even a salt container can have a casting department.

In January 2018, Sebbag also became co-chair of PromaxBDA’s board, having served as vice chair. He joined NBC’s Scot Chastain in the role; the organization’s 2018-19 board subsequently listed him alongside co-chair Tim Nolan. This put him in an industry leadership position during a shift toward streaming. By June 2018, digital and streaming companies held one-third of its network seats, bringing newer distribution businesses into the association’s governing mix.

Sebbag described the appointment as an opportunity to give back to the organization at a consequential time for the industry. It was a different scale of responsibility from completing a campaign: helping guide the strategic direction of a professional association. His agency work and board service occupied adjoining parts of the same business, one making the material and the other concerned with the community making it.

Then the brand became his own

Casa Del Sol launched in September 2021, with Eva Longoria among its co-founders and Sebbag among the founding partners. By January 2022, he was publicly identified as CEO. The company’s team included president Colbi Corbett, head of production Alejandra Pelayo and artesana tequilera Mariana Padilla. The move brought him from promoting clients’ properties into building a consumer brand in which he had a founding role.

The tequila’s launch connected production in Jalisco with French Cognac barrels sourced through Laurent Martell. Its initial range comprised blanco, reposado and añejo. Alongside Longoria’s visibility, the company foregrounded the experience of the women involved in production and leadership. It had a celebrity co-founder, but also people whose work concerned what went into the bottle and how the business would reach its customers.

That required infrastructure as well as imagery. Early in 2022, Casa Del Sol appointed Clarissa Clark to lead sales and Brian Condon to lead distribution operations. The distinction is mundane and necessary. A campaign can make someone curious about a product; sales and distribution help determine whether that person can actually find it. Sebbag’s new venture came with a different set of operating demands beneath its public presentation.

By summer 2023, Casa Del Sol was partnering with Rove, a ride service in the Hamptons. Sebbag discussed the partnership at a dinner celebrating it, explaining that the brand had advertised on Jitney buses the previous year and wanted to try something different. The placement moved with its audience. After posters, screens and gallery walls, here was another surface on which a brand could travel.

The route from Soho to Melrose Avenue and onward to Casa Del Sol resists a tidy job description. It includes collecting art, commissioning work, directing performers, building organizations and finding partners. The connections are visible in the particulars: Tanguy bringing a book to breakfast, Bacon submitting to honey, Ice Cube speaking from a rooftop. Sebbag’s career becomes easier to understand when those particulars get their turn in the foreground. There is usually something to look at.