Facebook’s internal agency team has added its first two creative hires in Canada to support agency work on its platform.
Neil Mohan and Kayla Osmond will serve as creative agency partners within Facebook Canada, consulting on the planning and production of creative for the social media company’s family of apps and services, with a special focus on mobile creative. They will collaborate with Canadian strategic and creative talent to produce work across Facebook platforms.
Mohan comes from Edelman, where he served as VP of creative technology in Toronto. Before that, he was a group digital director at Ogilvy and a senior digital integrator at Juniper Park.
Osmond joins the company from Leo Burnett, where she was an account director, having previously worked as an account executive with Toronto digital and creative agencies Dashboard and Agency59.
In a statement to strategy, Facebook Canada said their hiring comes in response to demand from clients and Canadian agencies to have a voice inside of Facebook to help build campaigns using the right tools and insights, adding that the role has already been implemented in many other regions around the world.
The company has a separate marketing team that work directly with brands.
Since joining Facebook in April, Mohan and Osmond have worked on a variety of mobile-first campaigns. Working with Rethink, for example, Osmond played the role of “platform consultant” on a social campaign for A&W’s Beyond Meat Burger, says Darren Yada, managing director at Rethink in Vancouver.
“Historically, Facebook’s been good at sharing ‘general’ best practices,” he says, “but when we have hunches on new approaches we think will improve creative performance it’s extremely beneficial to have a direct point of contact to run ideas by.”
Working with the creative agency team, Osmond helped Rethink “work through the various nuances in creating, shooting and editing over twenty variations of content surfaced within Facebook and Instagram,” says Yada, adding that having an inside partner helps increase clients’ willingness to try new approaches.
As part of their roles, Mohan and Osmond will also help produce events bringing together the creative agency community. For example, Facebook recently held a training day for creative agency strategists and a “Create Together” event for creative agency production teams.
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