In the early days of his career, Richard Kelly devoted himself to becoming the president of an advertising agency. He reached his goal in 1977, only to find that the administrative burdens of the job kept him from doing what he loved best: thinking. Thinking about brands, thinking about strategy, thinking about consumers and their changing needs.

So, after five years on his own as a strategic marketing consultant and brand guru par excellence, his decision to take on the newly created job of senior vice-president of strategic marketing at Molson Breweries took many who know Kelly, personally and professionally, by surprise. Surprise because of Kelly’s long history as a consultant for Molson arch-rival Labatt Breweries and his close association with Hugh Powell, former Labatt president and now chief operating officer of the Americas operation of Labatt’s parent, Interbrew S.A.

Kelly and Powell first met in the 1970s. When Powell went on to join Nabob, he hired Kelly’s then-agency Scali McCabe Sloves.

After he became president of Labatt Ontario in the early 1990s, Powell brought in Kelly as a consultant, a role Kelly continued to hold, off and on, until accepting his new job at Molson.

Some have interpreted Molson’s hiring of a top gun like Kelly as a sign of escalation in the beer wars. Others expect to see major changes in the way Molson handles its marketing and advertising, basing their speculation on the changes Labatt introduced while Kelly was a consultant. They included the consolidation of advertising with one agency, Toronto’s Ammirati Puris Lintas, as well as a focus on the Labatt corporate brand.

Kelly says he’d been considering getting out of the consulting business and back into a larger company for more than a year when Molson called.

His new role won’t be to manage people or processes, however, but to do the thinking he enjoys most, while acting as a catalyst for efforts to outsmart the competition.

‘This job is ideal for me. It’s wonderful to operate at the management level of a big Canadian company with lots of marketing issues in a thinking job, not an operations or management job.

‘Frankly, it was so extraordinary that it took about two seconds to decide that this is what I should do.’

Kelly says his Labatt connection is a non-issue, adding that he’s had no involvement in the company’s last year of planning.

In fact, he says he hadn’t talked to Labatt for four months when he called Powell to tell him he was taking a job with Molson. The conversation was friendly, and Kelly says there is implicit trust that any knowledge he has of Labatt will not be discussed – a point he was up front about with his new employer.

Kelly began his career as a trainee copywriter in an industrial advertising agency in Birmingham, England.

He soon realized if he wanted to become an agency president, he’d have to move to London, and get involved with a sophisticated packaged goods account.

He talked himself into the job of assistant account executive on Procter & Gamble at Grey London, and then moved on to Grey New York where, at 27, he became the youngest account supervisor in the agency.

Although management tried to talk him out of it, Kelly still had his eye on heading up an agency, so rather than lose him, they sent him to Grey Toronto to manage six p&g brands for Canada.

After two years, Kelly moved to Hayhurst where he thought he could get ahead faster.

Eighteen months later, in October 1977, Kelly finally realized his dream when Martin Sloves gave him and Gary Prouk the chance to open the Canadian office of Scali McCabe Sloves – with Kelly as president.

‘I was president there for five-and-a-half years,’ says Kelly. ‘It was horrible in terms of being emotionally draining É and I got divorced. It was a rough time, but a very uplifting time as well, and I’ve still got very close relationships with a lot of the people who used to work there.

‘But for me, I felt at the time I wanted to do something else.’

Kelly’s itchy feet took him to Los Angeles, where he headed the office of Wells Rich Greene before opening an office for Scali McCabe Sloves which later closed.

In 1988, he came back to Toronto as president of Ambrose Carr Deforest and Linton, which changed its name to Ambrose Carr Linton Kelly.

But dissatisfaction set in again after a few years, and Kelly decided he was tired of the agency business.

Just prior to leaving aclk, Powell became president of Labatt Ontario and offered Kelly a small consulting assignment.

‘He asked me on my own to read all the research and give him an interpretation and suggest to him some things to think about.

‘That was one of the triggers that said, `hey I could do this for a living.’ It’s ironic in way.

‘Then I went off on my own and started from scratch again for the third time. It turned out to be lucky.’