Lion & Lion snares Cheelip Ong as regional creative officer

Lion & Lion Digital Group has appointed Cheelip Ong as its Chief Creative Officer to drive the creative growth of the agency across the region. In his role, Cheelip will be responsible for translating Lion & Lion’s new strategic direction into a creative product that delivers results for clients and be an industry differentiator.

Lion & Lion recently restructured the company’s investments to focus on three core areas of strategy, media and creative; to establish itself as a partner that creatively solves business problems for their clients.

Cheelip has the perfect profile to lead this transformation with his proven creative capabilities and sound business acumen that truly resonates with Lion & Lion’s new direction. “We are really excited to welcome a proven creative leader such as Cheelip officially on board Lion & Lion.

As creativity is the heart of our strategic approach to problem-solving, Cheelip’s hiring is a testimony to our new way of working and positioning in the market. “ said Fredrik Gumpel, Chief Executive Officer of Lion & Lion.

The hiring of Cheelip is a game-changer for the agency, as his profile and extensive experience and proven track record in creative and strategy personifies the company’s new direction focused on creative problem-solving.

Cheelip will drive the overall Group creative agenda when it comes to developing the agency’s internal creative capabilities and ways of working while also building stronger brand awareness across the region.

He will work closely with Lion & Lion’s Executive Creative Director, Jonathan Crawford, a highly awarded creative who joined the company in June with more than 15 years experience in the industry.

Their combined expertise and experience pushes Lion & Lion up as a force-to-be-reckoned-with in the industry. “With the key hiring of Cheelip, we will have two of the best creative brains leading our team, and this shows how committed we are about our living up to our new value proposition.

By boosting our creative muscles, we believe we can better keep that promise and unlock value from strategy to implementation,” added Gumpel.

For Cheelip, the decision to board the ship to Lion & Lion was an easy one, as growing capabilities and building businesses are his well-known repertoires. Added Cheelip, “Together with the management team, I endeavour to design an agency in which creativity functions as a behaviour of the organisation, rather than as a department to create meaningful and purposeful solutions for our clients.

“I believe in growing new capabilities and using those capabilities to enhance the creative product; to explore and harness the power of technology to build powerful brand experiences for our clients. I found all of these to fit very well with Lion & Lion’s ambition.”

Besides being a proven and award-winning creative leader, Cheelip has a successful track record of building and transforming agencies and brands in multiple markets — Singapore, Tokyo, China, and Vietnam.

In the course of his career, he has won advertising awards across multiple categories at award shows such as: CLIO Awards, Cannes, LIA, One Show, Communication Arts, Global Best Digital Advertising Awards, EFFIES , SPIKES, ADFEST, Red Dot Design Awards , amongst others.

He is also a regular jury member at advertising awards shows such as inaugural Creative e-Commerce category at Cannes Lions 2018, Cresta Global Awards, The One Club for The Young Ones Awards and China Content Marketing Awards. He was also named the Digital A-List Achiever for Greater China in 2018 by Campaign Magazine.