McCann has strengthened its creative team in Montreal, hiring Marie-Eve Best as creative director.

As a CD, Best will have a major role in the agency’s beauty portfolio, which includes L’Oréal Paris, Maybelline and Essie, but she will also work on the Nespresso account. Best will report to Dave Roberts, who was hired as ECD at McCann Montreal last fall.

Roberts says one of his goals in joining McCann was to elevate the creative product coming out of Montreal to the same level as the agency’s other global offices. To that end, Best is the first of “several” creative hires who are currently in the works.

Best joins after more than three years as a creative director at Bleublancrouge, where she oversaw the agency’s Sephora, Sico and Dulux Paints accounts.

The new creative addition comes as many agencies have been forced to cut costs in response to a downturn in client business during the pandemic – including staff reductions. Harris Diamond, McCann Worldgroup’s chairman and CEO, said in April that the agency was taking “a variety of actions” across its network to navigate COVID-19’s economic impact, including salary cuts, freezes on hiring, furloughs and reductions in staffing. Those measures have varied from market to market, though McCann has not provided details on the degree to which they have impacted individual offices, including Canada.