After more than 30 years in various agency roles, including the past 25 with BCP in Montreal, Carol Ann Kairns is leaving to become general sales manager with Corus Média.
Carol Ann Kairns
Reporting to Corus Média president Mario Cecchini, Kairns will oversee sales and revenue for the French specialty TV services Télétoon, Teletoon Retro, Historia and Series+. Her official start date is June 16.
“I wasn’t looking for a change, it just came,” said Kairns, who began working with BCP’s media department in 1989 and has been the agency’s general manager since 2011. “Corus is a company I’ve always admired; I just love who they are, what they represent and their values.
“When the train passed, I just wanted to jump aboard and be part of it.”
Kairns officially leaves BCP on June 6. The agency has hired Montreal-based communications consultant André Phaneuf to handle its media department on a short-term contract, while an external search for Kairns’ successor as GM continues.
She said that a confluence of factors—the right time, the right position and the right company—led to her departure from the agency she’s been with for more than two decades.
“I obviously love BCP, I wouldn’t have been here for that long if I didn’t, but it was more of a question I had in my head: ‘What would I want to do for the next 10 years?’” she said. “This came around and I thought, ‘Why not try something completely different?’ Hopefully I’ll be able to make a very positive impact.”
She said she has no reservations about the abrupt shift in her career. “It’s all very positive,” she said. “I’m not afraid, I have no concerns, no worries. I’m joining a solid company with great values; they’re people I know fairly well because I’ve dealt with them on the sales side for years. There are absolutely no concerns on my part; this will be a great challenge, something very new, and I look forward to it.”
Asked to assess the highlights of her long career with BCP, Kairns singled out her rise from the media department to become GM of the full-service agency. “There are not a lot of media people heading full-service agencies in Canada, or even across the globe, so to me that’s a huge achievement,” she said.
She also singled out the agency’s long association with P&G, which dated back to 1973 before the packaged goods giant consolidated its media assignment with Carat earlier this year.
“It’s quite an achievement in this world of globalization to be able to say P&G was a client of BCP’s for over 25 years,” said Kairns.
