Sloane Hayes Skala Joins WW7 as Executive Producer
The Los Angeles-based production company, comedy darling WORLD WAR SEVEN, has hired industry veteran Sloane Hayes Skala as executive producer. Sloane brings over a decade of commercial production experience to her role at WW7, where she’ll represent a roster of beloved comedy directors and oversee ad campaigns. Alongside exec producing, Sloane will further her mission to recruit, develop, and nurture both established and emerging voices for WW7 as they grow their careers in commercial directing.
Sloane joins WW7 from Roman Coppola’s production company, The Directors Bureau, where she served as the executive producer since 2021 and represented powerhouse directors like Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, Natasha Lyonne, and Emmanuel Adjei, overseeing projects for some of the world’s foremost artists and luxury brands, including Chanel and Louis Vuitton. Notable collaborations include Tiffany & Co.’s global brand relaunch, a campaign starring Beyoncé and Jay-Z that took over Times Square and a dozen other major city centres across the globe, as well as the splashy 2022 global brand relaunch of Absolut Vodka. Before going in-house at the Directors Bureau, Sloane spent a decade as a freelance commercial line producer, heading award-winning global campaigns for high-profile directors and talent.
Storytelling is in Sloane’s blood. She grew up in Hollywood, the granddaughter of Oscar-winning screenwriter John Michael Hayes, whose legendary credits include ‘Rear Window’, among other films for Alfred Hitchcock. Sloane carried on the family tradition, graduating from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, after which she produced and EP’d a web series for RedBull, the brand’s first-ever series and narrative property and one of the first major branded projects to use influencers as talent. Sloane also served as head of production for RedBull TV during that time. She broke into commercial producing in 2010, with her first project being a Super Bowl spot for Dannon, starring John Stamos.
“I feel like I’ve really found my home. You know that feeling when you’re in the right place, with the right people, and everything just clicks?” said Sloane. “I feel lucky and grateful to be in the company of such talented, smart, hilarious, and fun collaborators. It’s inspiring to see how effective the ‘small but mighty’ ethos has been for WW7 – we have kind of a David & Goliath thing going on. We’ve been able to tackle huge campaigns with a boutique-sized team, and I think it comes down to our team of kind, creative people who work hard and have a great time doing it. The work is so much better when we all truly love what we do.”
“We’re a very tight-knit team that’s extremely selective about who we work with. Of course, they need to be exceptional at their jobs, but equally important is that they be great people we truly enjoy spending time with,” said WW7 co-founder Josh Ferrazano. “That’s always been a core part of our DNA as a company, and Sloane fits in like she’s family. We’ve been searching high and low for someone like Sloane for years to help us launch this next phase of our company, and we lucked out finding not someone like Sloane, but Sloane herself. And it was worth the wait.”
“We’ve had our eye on Sloane’s career for a while now,” added co-founder David Shafei. “Her credits speak for themselves. She’s a force of nature as a producer, and as we’ve been learning, is much beloved by agencies, clients, and production teams alike. But she’s also a great human – it’s apparent why she’s been able to build such strong relationships across our industry,” said David. “At the risk of sounding cheesy, she’s our business soulmate, and we’re excited to see where she leads us.”
The addition of Sloane as EP marks a new period of growth for the company. Earlier in the year, WW7 added new music video representation in Reveur, building upon the successes of the company’s lauded ad campaigns. Recent commercial highlights include David Shafei’s inventive ‘Oreo Vault,’ in which Oreo teamed up with real-life astronomers to help them locate a vault location to preserve Oreos for a future generation in the event of an asteroid strike; MAMA’s buzzed-about, darkly comedic ‘Dave’s Hot Chicken’ spots; and Lizzy Born’s holiday film for Vogue x Grey Goose, starring White Lotus’s Alexandra Daddario.
WW7 is represented by Resource on the West Coast, David & Sam for Midwest, and Ziegler Jakubowicz for East Coast.
