BBDO Canada has announced Stéphane Charier and Geneviève Grenier will take control of the Montreal-based Nolin BBDO as co-directors general.
Charier and Grenier replace former BBDO Montréal president Alain Gignac, who has left the agency.
“Now we’re at this stage of our evolution, I thought it was best to appoint Stéphane and Geneviève to their current positions,” said BBDO Canada president and CEO Gerry Frascione.
Gignac’s primary mandate over the past two years was overseeing Nolin’s merger with BBDO Montreal, said Frascione.
Charier, who rejoined BBDO Montréal from Taxi Montreal last year, will retain his role as chief creative officer with Nolin BBDO. Frascione called him an “outstanding” creative director, lauding both his creative sensibilities and his holistic approach to marketing.
Grenier, who joined the agency in June 2010 as strategic planning director and senior director – leaving Age design, a firm she co-founded in 2006 – will also serve as chief strategy officer for Nolin BBDO.
In a telephone interview Thursday, Frascione told Marketing that the agency merger is the culmination of a plan developed by the Omnicom Group-operated network three years ago. It is intended to meld creative depth with the rigour of design, enabling the 30-person agency to better provide holistic marketing solutions for clients, he said.
“It’s a strategic move to bring together two disciplines that I think will result in better communications solutions for clients,” said Frascione. “As campaigns today have more moving parts than ever before, what we are doing more and more for clients is designing brand experiences.”
Frascione said that today’s marketing is typically built around a “brand narrative” that begins with insight into the user experience with a brand. That discussion happens “instinctively” in the brand design world, he said, and can then be brought to life by BBDO’s creative capabilities.
“Once you’ve designed the brand experience, it’s then a question of expressing it creatively, and that’s where BBDO comes in,” he said. Work that BBDO has done for clients such as the Federation of Milk Producers of Québec embodies that approach, he said.
