Welcome in, today is Thursday, August thirteenth, and we begin with a resignation at the top of one of South Africa's better-known creative agencies, reported by The Citizen. Avatar Agency Group says co-founder Veli Ngubane has stepped down as co-chief creative officer, effective immediately. The Citizen reports the exit follows a video filmed at Cannes Lions in late June and circulated widely on TikTok, in which Ngubane, in Cannes as a jury member, is heard rating two women out of ten and telling them that if he were a ten, he could take them back to his hotel room, no questions asked. In that same account, the content creators who recorded the encounter say the man flipped his conference badge over once they mentioned where he worked, and one of them describes being objectified at work. In its statement, Avatar said founder and group chief executive Zibusiso Mkhwanazi will continue to lead the business, with Phil Ireland appointed sole chief creative officer on an interim basis, and said the agency does not tolerate behaviour that falls short of its conduct standards. A co-founder out within days of the clip spreading puts agency conduct standards, and how fast leadership answers for them, back in front of clients. Also today, a marker of where Asia-Pacific holding-company leadership is landing after consolidation. Mumbrella reports Nine Entertainment has appointed Leigh Terry to its board of directors, effective August twenty-sixth, under chairman Peter Tonagh. Terry joins eight months after he was let go from IPG Mediabrands following Omnicom's twenty billion Australian dollar acquisition, which per that reporting also swept up local chief executive Mark Coad. He had been chief executive of IPG Mediabrands Asia Pacific, a role AdNews reports covered more than five thousand people across sixteen markets. In an update to the ASX, Nine cited his regional profit-and-loss stewardship, mergers-and-acquisitions integration and operating-model transformation. Tonagh said Terry has spent his career on the other side of the table, deciding where the region's largest advertisers put their money. Terry's earlier run includes joining OMD in two thousand five and leading Omnicom Media Group in Australia and New Zealand from twenty eleven. His arrival follows Nine making thirty roles redundant across its publishing division. Separately, Gap's fall denim campaign, "Denim on Your Own," pairs breakout actor Inde Navarrette, of "Obsession," with singer-songwriter Malcolm Todd, who performs his own rendition of Robyn's "Dancing on My Own." That is per Marketing Dive, which describes the ads as built around the two dancing together. Adweek calls it a fresh creative approach for the season. It is the same music-and-dance formula the retailer has run before, a template that keeps casting and track licensing, rather than the product, at the centre of the brief. Marketing-side reaction leans toward reading it as a brand-building exercise more than a denim ad, with a recurring view that the brand's recent momentum comes from borrowing credibility from collaborators who are already culturally relevant, instead of signalling cool on its own. Some practitioners frame the repeated casting of emerging musicians and actors as a deliberate pipeline rather than one-off celebrity buys, and a few flag the pull with younger and Latino audiences as the growth bet underneath it. Also worth your time, Digiday's Kimeko McCoy goes inside how independent agency Mod Op is building its own AI infrastructure. The argument is a build-over-buy case. Mod Op is betting that infrastructure it owns delivers more value than simply licensing off-the-shelf tools. Framed that way, the open question for the rest of the independent market is whether proprietary AI tooling can hold up as a differentiator an agency owns and sells against, or whether it settles into being one more cost line passed through to clients. That is the author's read, not a settled market view, and it is worth reading in full before anyone builds a business case off it. Now, a few more headlines moving the trade today. Adweek reports Disney has named Joss Hastings senior vice president of marketing for Disney Consumer Products globally, the latest in a run of marketing moves at the company. And finally, on the platforms side, Disney and TikTok have struck a deal giving creators access to scenes and characters from hundreds of Disney films and series, per MediaPost, launching first in the United States.