McCann Canada has promoted Josh Stein to chief creative officer, providing creative leadership for the agency at the national level.

Stein joined McCann in 2016, overseeing the agency’s creative department in Toronto as ECD and working with clients such as Chevrolet, Petro-Canada, Prostate Cancer Canada and the Ontario Government. Now, he will oversee creative for all McCann offices in Canada, which also include Montreal and Western Canada.

McCann has been without a national CCO in Canada since the departure of Darren Clarke at the beginning of the year, at which time it instead moved to having creative led by its roster of ECDs in its individual offices.

Assisting Stein and providing on-the-ground creative leadership in Montreal is new ECD Dave Roberts. Roberts comes from CloudRaker, where he was ECD for almost three years, but also spent ten years helping to lead the creative product at Sid Lee. His previous client work includes Adidas, Heineken, Red Bull, Samsung, Cirque du Soleil, Mondelez, Toronto Raptors and SportChek.

Sacha Ouimet, the previous ECD in the Montreal office, recently left the agency to go client-side, becoming global creative director for hockey brand CCM.

The new creative leadership come admist a number of other recent senior hires made in response to client growth, which have included new and expanded assignments with Bayer, Saxx, Nestlé, Petro-Canada, University of Toronto and the Ministry of Finance.

In Toronto, the agency has hired creative director Gail Pak (who comes from Zulu Alpha Kilo where she worked on Interac, Corona and Whirlpool) and ACD Ihar Turtsou (from Publicis.Sapient). In Montreal, Roberts’ new team now also includes ACD Olivier Fortin (who was hired in March after more the seven years at Banfield) and senior writer Alexandre Gravel-Soublière (who was hired in April from Forsman & Bodenfors).

It’s been a busy year for McCann when it comes to changes in its structure and leadership. Other moves have included reorganizing its health practice, naming a new president for McCann Canada and MRM/McCann and a new strategy lead in Montreal.