KBS went looking in non-traditional spaces for a new boss of its Montreal office and, in the Moment, they found the person for the job.
Pierre-Luc Paiement, formerly marketing director of the hot Montreal creative experience studio Moment Factory has just been named managing director at the MDC-owned shop. While he joins KBS from outside the traditional advertising world, his career began at Cossette and he’s had marketing roles with Bose and Bombardier.
Nick Dean, president and CEO of KBS Canada, said while agencies were still providing value to their clients, agency models needed to be rapidly reinvented to remain relevant to clients.
“I do believe that we, as an industry, have to change,” he told Marketing. “We have to evolve and we have to evolve quickly if we want to survive.”
Agencies need to be less about process and project flows and act more like startups getting quickly to ideas that can have a meaningful impact for clients, he said.
To that end, the agency made a concerted effort to find someone who could bring new perspectives and thinking as well as unique experiences to the position, he said.
Paiement was an ideal fit because he has agency and client experience, but he was most recently with one of the most innovative live events brands in Canada, and live activations and live events are an increasingly important discipline for Canadian marketers.
“There are certain companies that we all envy and we look at them and say they are doing things that are really interesting and we’d love to be doing that as well,” said Dean of Moment Factory.
“The agency world is currently caught in a sea of sameness. We’re not interested in doing the same old same old. We’re interested in driving cultural change through modern thinking,” said Paiement in a release announcing his hiring.
