Phill Dodd
Eugene Andruszczenko
Bensimon Byrne is expanding its digital and user experience capabilities with a senior hire and a promotion on its technology team.
Eugene Andruszczenko joins as director of technology, where he’ll head up Bensimon’s development projects and coordinate with creative and strategy teams to design interactive solutions. Working with Andruszczenko will be Phill Dodd, who after three years working on interactive development with the agency has been promoted to director of user experience.
Partner and CD Joseph Bonnici said the agency has chosen to build up its web and mobile development capabilities internally, rather than subcontracting them to a specialized development firm.
“I sit three feet away from Eugene, five feet away from Phil, and 20 feet away from the dev team,” he said. “Versus having to work with someone out-of-house, there’s a huge advantage in terms of the efficiency involved, and also in terms of making it much easier to collaborate.”
As an example of the kind of deep development work Bensimon is looking to do more of, Bonnici pointed to an app it recently created for Scotiabank to host public chats with influencers like NHL Alumni and W Network’s Property Brothers. Unlike a standard, one-off mobile app built for a campaign, the technically intensive project left the client with an asset they could use to create content whenever they needed it.
Bonnici said Andruszczenko’s past experience as executive director of technology at Havas Worldwide in Toronto, and before that as interactive developer at Sapient and Teehan+Lax, would be a major asset to those kinds of projects. Andruszczenko has also been a technical lead at global IT services provider CGI.
Dodd, meanwhile, is known for being proactive and pushing everyone around him at the agency to go that extra step in digital.
Bonnici credits Dodd as being responsible for a significant chunk of the agency’s growth over the past three years. In that time, Bensimon has hired 50 additional staff and grown to a headcount of 180.
