BBDO Canada has promoted Jeff McCrory to chief strategy officer after two years as the head of its RBC account.
In the newly-created role, McCrory will lead the agency’s planning group, drawing on his background as a senior-level strategist at Dentsu and Downtown Partners.
“The bulk of my career has been spent in planning, so for me it’s fantastically exciting to get back to a planning focus,” McCrory told Marketing. “It’s the thing I like most about the business — my one true passion.”
McCrory spent six years as chief strategy officer of Downtown Partners, where he worked on award-winning campaigns like “Bud Light Institute” and Sport Chek’s “Dress like a Pro.” Before that he was a brand director at Labbatt Breweries of Canada.
As one of his first tasks, he’ll be hiring at least two additional planners focused on digital strategy. He said the agency is investing heavily in moving its cross-channel planning capabilities forward.
“Our collective job is, how do we build the group such that it interacts with the rest of the agency,” he said. “We’re not building an older school planning model, where the planners lock themselves in a room and come back and drop tablets they’ve brought down from the mount. We’re going to run an exceptionally collaborative process.”
He sees two main objectives for the new team: coming up with ways to solve brands’ problems, and making sure that those solutions are deployed effectively.
“It’s kind of the search for the truth,” he said. “Just interrogating problems and brands, so that they actually spit out the truth.”
