Toronto-based Jackman Reinvents has a designer plan for the future, and hired Israel Diaz to help make it a reality.
Diaz joined the Toronto-based firm as executive vice-president, chief creative and design officer on Monday. He was most recently chief creative officer at Y&R Toronto, which merged with Taxi earlier this summer.
“They did try to find a role for me within the [WPP] network, but it required relocation and I really wanted to stay in Toronto,” Diaz told Marketing.
He was drawn to Jackman because of its reputation for solving the very modern problems facing many brand builders today. Much more a brand and business consultancy than an agency, Jackman has enjoyed successes in Canada and the U.S. by applying management consulting, research, strategy and experience design expertise to “reinvent” the customer experience for a host of big-name, mostly retail, clients like Walgreens, Duane Reade, Hertz, The Beer Store and Sobey’s.
Launched in 2007, the firm has grown to about 100 people and about a third of them are creatives across a wide range of disciplines from writers to digital experts and retail store designers.
“I’ve been admiring Jackman’s model for quite a while,” said Diaz of the decision to leave the traditional ad agency world.
“In advertising we get called in too late, trying to fix [a problem] with a campaign when the crux of the matter is probably a business issue that we are unable to affect,” he said.
“[Jackman has] been upstream where they are actually building the brand DNA, the heavy-duty business stuff, connecting that to the consumer and then getting into the creative and the execution,” he said.
Diaz fills the creative lead seat left vacant by Brett Channer, who joined Jackman in March 2014 and was with the firm for about one year.
Jackman CEO Joe Jackman said they took their time finding the right person to fill the post and chose Diaz because, while he comes from an advertising background, he understands consumers today experience brands in many different ways beyond advertising. “He really has a clear sense of brands as ecosystems of touchpoints and I was very taken with that,” said Jackman.
Jackman was also drawn to Diaz’s interest in data—“The better agencies are the ones that take data and analytics and apply them,” said Jackman—and his experience and appreciation for design and design thinking, an increasingly valued commodity in marketing and branding circles.
“We live in an age where design is taken more seriously,” said Jackman. And Diaz has an “enthusiasm for the power of design.”
Originally the position was for a chief creative officer, but after some discussion about what the role should be they added design to the title. “The notion of a chief design officer is newish out there,” said Diaz. It reflects the still relatively nascent appreciation for more thoughtful treatment of consumers and goes beyond just graphic and visual design. To connect with consumers, brands have to be “empathetic about their needs,” said Diaz. It’s much more about utility and adding value to consumers’ lives at all touchpoints rather than just pushing out communications messages, he said.
“If you look back a decade, design was something that happened at the end of the strategy process,” said Jackman. “Most enlightened companies [today] bring design forward into their business thinking. Design is at the table as business strategy is developed and those two worlds come together.”
“Having worked with Israel, I can attest to his unparalleled design aesthetic,” said David Moore, advisory board chairman, Jackman Reinvents, in a release. Moore is a former CEO of Leo Burnett Toronto where Diaz worked before Y&R. “He is a true craftsman of creative strategy, art and design, and those skills will lend themselves to the kind of profound transformative work that Jackman does.”
