Toronto’s Lowe Roche has hired Pete Breton and Dave Douglass away from Cossette, installing the duo as national co-chief creative officers.
Breton and Douglass were co-CCOs at Cossette’s Toronto office, where in 2009 they took over for Bill Durnan as lead English creatives. Their decade-long creative partnership includes work for clients such as General Mills, McDonald’s, Budweiser and Lexus.
The move to Lowe Roche puts Breton and Douglass in newly created roles in charge of creative teams at the agency’s Toronto office and at Montreal’s Amuse, which Lowe and Partners acquired earlier this year.
“Lowe Roche has a great history of creativity and they’ve done some amazing work,” said Douglass. “There’s potential to build on that great foundation and do some fresh thinking and agnostic creative work.”
Asked how the new hires will affect current co-creative directors Steph Mackie and Mark Biernacki‘s roles at the company, Monica Ruffo, CEO of Lowe Roche and Amuse, would only say that it is still being negotiated. Mackie and Biernacki have, until now, led the agency’s creative output.
The hiring reunites Breton and Douglass with former Cossette colleague Ruffo, who worked there from 1996 to 2008.
Cossette spokesperson Mark Smyka said the pair’s resignation came as a surprise, but that the departures would have minimal impact on client work.
“We’ve got creative leadership on every account, and our group creative directors will manage their clients as we look for new overall creative leadership,” Smyka said.
“I’m a huge believer in putting together teams that work really well together,” said Ruffo. “Our business is becoming more complex and more multifaceted and I think one of the keys to success is having a diverse group of people working together who actually like spending time together figuring things out.”
The new Lowe Roche and Amuse creative team, which officially begins work in early January, is the latest of several additions Ruffo has made to the agencies’ senior leadership, including the hiring of Selma Filali as senior vice-president and managing director of Amuse.
