What Would I Change: Chloe Saintilan, R/GA

As part of CR’s series exploring what creatives would change about their industries following this enforced period of lockdown, we speak to R/GA New York senior creative Chloe Saintilan

Originally hailing from Australia, Chloe Saintilan built up her experience in the ad industry at agencies including Republic of Everyone and TBWA\Sydney, before moving to the US and joining R/GA New York as a senior creative in 2018. Since then, she has worked across projects ranging from a music video for a Grammy Award-winning artist to a Matchbox car celebrating a female race car champion for Mercedes-Benz.

The pandemic certainly hasn’t put a stop to Saintilan’s creative streak; since lockdown began she has worked on a series of reactive campaigns for some of R/GA’s key clients, as well as starting a new business, Merch Aid, on the side, in a bid to support small businesses forced to close or significantly alter their business models.

Here, Saintilan discusses the challenges of bringing a new business to life remotely, how she’s adapted to the madness of the lockdown workload and why the pandemic is changing the ad industry for the better.

Going into lockdown We had multiple, huge productions that were in the works. One of them was going to be shot at a huge baseball game, that obviously went out the window as soon as Covid really started, and the other one also required flying to a lot of places, so both immediately got put on hold. Immediately we were working from home, getting used to collaborating exclusively over Slack and Zoom but also trying to keep up with all of these briefs that were coming in from brands needing to react to what was happening. It was a case of hitting the ground running and having to learn really quickly about how to use these tools to keep up business as usual.