Senior appointments stack Edelman with digital experts
Edelman Canada announced three senior leadership appointments Tuesday, rounding out its executive team with a focus on digital expertise.
Dave Fleet will now act as senior vice-president of Eastern Canada while Steve Park will take on the role of senior vice-president Western Canada. Paul Ortchanian has also been appointed vice-president of technology.
Both Fleet and Park previously held SVP roles at the agency and will now oversee territories. Prior to joining Edelman, Fleet was vice-president of social media at Thornley Fallis Communications and a senior communications coordinator for the Government of Ontario. Park was principal and lead strategist at Net Positive Digital and senior director of strategy at Blast Radius.
Ortchanian also worked at Blast Radius as technical experience director, and was a creative technologist at Goodby Silverstein & Partners.
John Clinton, CEO of Edelman Canada, said in a release that the appointments reflect the agency’s focus on digital marketing. “At Edelman, we have long championed the potential and power of digital. Globally, we continue to invest heavily in this area, deliberately gathering the finest minds in the field and bringing them together to drive progress and deliver solutions for our clients,” he said.
Creative newsroom
The PR firm also officially launched a creative newsroom, providing a physical home for the real-time marketing services it has long offered clients. Like the appointments, the creation of the creative newsroom reflects Edelman’s investment in digital, bringing together content creators, strategists, analysts and media experts to create content to share on its clients’ social media channels.
It will have a dedicated physical space at the agency’s Toronto office. The launch follows the lead set by Edelman’s global counterparts – the firm has five newsrooms in the U.S. and one in the U.K. Adobe, ConAgra Foods and PayPal are among the clients that have used Edelman’s newsroom services in the U.S.
In the past Edelman Canada has taken the newsroom approach on several accounts, including Kobo and Jello. During the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week in July – an annual phenomenon on the social web – the agency created an ad to share on Facebook with a shark fin poking out of a bowl of blue jello. When the Canadian author Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for literature, the agency created a congratulatory ad to share on Kobo’s social channels.
In addition to tracking online conversations that relate to brands, as Munro’s win did to the literary-minded Kobo, Fleet told Marketing the creative newsroom will help brands create content and respond to consumer conversations during sporting events, awards shows and other live events that spark online chatter. Last year Edelman was publishing content for about five brands during the Super Bowl, and Fleet said he expects to handle at least as many this year.
Several other advertising and PR agencies have dedicated newsrooms that aim to keep up with the always-on nature of social media by consistently feeding digital channels with brand-created content that’s in-line with whatever the internet’s hive mind is buzzing about.
In early 2013, Pernod Ricard USA selected the New York-based agency Deep Focus as its AOR largely because of Moment Studio, its creative newsroom. In Canada, Toronto’s Digital Journal, a publisher, also has a division that creates similar socially minded content on behalf of brands.
