LONDON — Kindred has hired Chris Bamford to head up its creative department, as the agency aims to step up its consumer brand work.

Bamford joins from BBH, where he was PR creative director. He’ll be responsible for creative output across the agency, and lead its seven-strong creative team.

Before BBH, Bamford had a stint at The Academy and spent 13 years at Freuds, where he was a founding member of its creative department. As well as developing brand campaigns for Diageo, Samsung, Unilever and Lexus, he has worked on public sector campaigns including Sugar Boy for Public Health England and Beat Bullying for the Department for Education.

Bamford said: “There are lots of agencies who purport to do great purpose work, but Kindred has been delivering campaigns which have measurable, positive change for more than 20 years. They were also one of the first agencies to adopt behavioural science, which means their brand and public sector clients see real human impact. I’ve inherited a hungry, young creative team and we’re already looking to bolster our numbers.”

In addition, Charlotte Dolman joined the 40-strong agency as business director permanently in July after consulting since the end of last year. She was previously an executive director at Golin, where she was a member of the consumer leadership team worked on De’Longhi, Heinz and PepsiCo. She was previously an associate director at Mischief and a partner at parent company Engine, where she headed up the Heathrow account – a current client of Kindred’s - as well as National Trust and the Happy Egg Co.

Joint managing director Sharon Bange told PRovoke Media: “Our previous ECD, Mauro Rodriguez, came from Ogilvy Social Labs and was all about great above-the-line content, but we’ve had a refocus of the business on our PR heartland and we know Chris can really elevate our creativity purely from that earned perspective.

“Charlotte’s expertise is in consumer brands and that’s something we’re trying to grow our client base in. We still do a lot of meaty public sector behavioural change campaigns but we want to apply that to consumer brands, including the recent launch of the Marks & Spencer partnership with Ocado, which is one of Charlotte’s clients. These are challenging times and we’re seeing fewer long-term retainers on the table, but we really want to get our tetth stuck into some big creative-led campaigns.”