After a much-heralded return to Toronto in March 1995, Jane Pritchard and Young & Rubicam have parted company.

Pritchard was senior vice-president, creative director at J. Walter Thompson in Detroit when she was lured back to Canada to be executive creative director of y&r.

She worked at jwt in Toronto in the early 1980s and moved to the agency’s Hong Kong office in 1987 where she led the shop to agency of the year awards in 1988 and 1989.

Pritchard says she’s unsure of her plans.

‘I’m trying to regroup and think about what I’m going to do,’ she says.

‘I’m really good at new business and I’ve got a lot of experience in three countries. So I need to think, `what is the best challenge for me now?”

Howard Breen, who joined the agency as managing director four months ago, says Pritchard’s departure was a mutual decision.

‘We had a good creative product and a product that was working well for our clients. I wanted us to have a creative product that was even stronger. To that end, I wanted to make sure the leadership coming from the creative chief was going to deliver that,’ he says.

‘Jane and I had a lot of conversations and it came to a point where we decided it was time to make a change.’

The y&r creative department is now headed by John Farquhar and David Adams who have been promoted to senior vice-presidents, co-creative directors.

Farquhar, copywriter and Adams, art director joined the agency separately in the summer of 1995 but were soon a team and have been leading the creative development on AT&T Canada, as well as doing a lot of work on Ford.

Adams had been vice-president, group creative director at MacLaren: Lintas (now MacLaren McCann) for five years before moving to y&r.

Farquhar was at MacLaren from 1987 to 1992, when he opened Radio Dispatch, with Jungle Music, to write and produce radio commercials.