If the name David Kim doesn’t ring a bell, we’ll tell you that the senior creative was one of the masterminds behind Venables Bell & Partners’ Google Fiber launch from late July. Now, after spending nearly five years at the Bay Area agency, Kim has headed down south to Deutsch LA, where he has taken over as EVP, group digital creative director on Volkswagen. The new hire essentially succeeds Jerome Austria, who left Deutsch LA in August for the freelance circuit (though he’s probably still on that “surfing vacation” as we speak).

Along with the Google Fiber work, which helped celebrate the online giant’s launch of its super-fast internet/TV service in the Kansas City area, Kim has also pitched and led  the integrated campaign for Intel’s ambitious “The Chase” while at Venables. Prior to VB&P, the creative spent a few years as an AD/ACD at TBWA’s \Tequila and worked as an interactive CD at Publicis Seattle on T-Mobile. Guess you couldn’t write his mission statement at Deutsch LA any better as he says in a statement, “I aim to be the connective tissue between technology and creative design, bridging the gap between what is possible and what has not been done yet.” Godspeed, sir.

Last year, Google chose Kansas City over a number of contenders to be the first place to get access to the Internet monolith’s new super-fast 1GB-per-second service, Google Fiber. Announced today, KC residents will have access to 1GB-per-second download times for a monthly fee of $70.

As is becoming tradition, Google tapped Venables Bell & Partners to create a new charmingly whimsical scale model spot to celebrate Fiber’s launch. The result, “The Next Chapter of the Internet,” depicts the evolution of the Internet through toy cars, where traffic jams are synonymous with the terrible days of dial-up modems. Hey, remember when stealing a song on Napster required at 45 minutes of download time? That sucked.

Set to a little synth cover of The Cars’ timeless (yeah, I said it) classic, “Just What I Needed,” the sad little cars start zipping around like Hot Wheels. How stoked is Kansas City for the arrival of Google Fiber? Here’s the brand’s community activation video from agency Enso of residents begging their fellow Kansas Citians to pre-order Fiber by Sept. 9. Remember guys, it’s for kids, science and, uh, Wendall Phillips (which is a high school by the way).

View credits and Google’s “thanks” to the people of Kansas City which VP+B released last week, after the jump.
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Back in January, when Osama Bin Laden remained at large and Packers had not yet won the Super Bowl, we posted a video from Intel called “The Chase,” which advertised the new Intel Core i5 processor. At two minutes long, “The Chase” did that whole movie in computer windows and different online mediums, similar to the Arcade Fire’s interactive music video for “The Suburbs.”

This time around, “The Chase” (which garnered over 2.5 million views on YouTube) is being integrated into Facebook complete with a new game, character profiles and all sort of extra downloadable goodies. Unfortunately (as I learned attempting to run the programs on a MacBook Air), you pretty much need to own a computer with an Intel Core i5, unless you’d like “The Chase” to slow your computer to a slow crawl. With the help of a MacBook Pro (which utilizes an Intel Core i5 processor), I was able to make the Facebook page work. The page also requires an HTML 5 web browser (Chrome, IE9, Safari 5 or Firefox 4) to function. If you think about it, Intel and agency Venables Bell & Partners are really targeting techno-geeks by creating a barrier to entry of sorts for its Facebook page. And, hey, at half a million “Likes,” they must be doing something right. And, on social media, isn’t a “spy story” kind of the go-to genre these days? Credits,  and that original viral video, after the jump.

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