Christian Hellinger
Managing Director and Chief Creative Officer, Scholz & Friends Vienna, Austria
In 2012, Christian gained a foothold in the advertising industry and joined the Viennese creative agency Wien Nord in the following year, where he initially began his career in account management. Soon he switched to the creative side as a copywriter. Three years later, in 2016, he became Creative Director and an agency partner in 2019 – a position in which he successfully helped shaping the merger between Wien Nord and the international Serviceplan Group, Europe’s largest independent agency group, in 2020. He became a Managing Partner and Chief Creative Officer of the thus newly formed agency Wien Nord Serviceplan in January 2022, a position he held until the summer of 2025, when he joined the Scholz & Friends group. Christian started his current position as Managing Director and Chief Creative Officer of Scholz & Friends Vienna in September of 2025. His work has been awarded at multiple national Austrian festivals such as CCA and EFFIE as well as internationally at Golden Drum, Eurobest or ADC*E, to which Christian and his creative team contributed one of the festival’s most awarded works of the year 2024, “A Few Degrees More” for the Viennese Leopold Museum.
In 2024, he was elected president of the Creativ Club Austria (CCA), Austria’s largest association of representatives of the creative industry and member of the Art Directors Club of Europe (ADCE).
Christian holds a master’s degree in Romance languages as well as a bachelor’s degree in communication science at the University of Vienna, where he also taught as an external lecturer for advertising from 2015 to 2021. In the years 2024 and 2025 he authored a regular guest article in the German advertising trade publication “W&V” about industry trends and tech innovations in the communication sector. Christian lives and works in Vienna.
