Lori Davison is returning to the agency side of the business and reuniting with Peter Ignazi as she takes the role of chief strategy officer at Diamond.

Davison has worked with Ignazi – who joined Diamond as its CCO last Fall – both agency- and client-side. She worked with him at BBDO a decade ago before she moved to Leo Burnett and, eventually, into marketing positions at SickKids, where she once more worked with Ignazi while he co-led creative at Cossette. After SickKids – where she oversaw the launch of the SickKids VS brand platform, which drove $1.5 billion in fundraising – she made the move to the Royal Ontario Museum, another place where she could pursue one of her main passions: major brand transformations.

“My passion has always been for brand strategy and it continues to be so,” Davison tells strategy. “I chose client-side opportunities that represented what I saw as big, brand transformation opportunities. But my journey has always been back toward more of a consulting role, because I do love that aspect of the work; rallying different audiences around an idea is really what I get excited about. The question for me was where to go, and I decided that agency was the right place. And then it was a question of which agency.”

Davison considered her experience agency-side, which had always been with network agencies, and tried to identify what she wanted to do to determine the sort of shop she wanted to work at. Ultimately, she “got really excited” about the idea of working with Diamond in particular.

“The challenge for agencies right now is to find a way to scale ideas and get in front of the consumer with true engagement,” she explains. “Traditional agencies have been spending the last decade or more trying to figure out content, PR and experiences that activate the brand, but I like the idea of starting at the other side of it, with an agency whose DNA is really in true engagement – brand and consumer – and then to scale that through, starting with a really powerful brand idea. To me, that’s what Diamond does better than anybody.”

She did also note that she is “so charged about working with Peter [Ignazi] again.”

“I know what it’s like to work alongside him in an agency, as a creative leader,” she says. “In my opinion, he’s the best creative leader in Canada. He is one of the most awarded creatives in the whole world.”

With Diamond, Davison will work not only to bridge creative and business leadership, but also to focus on “connections planning and activation, thinking of strategy beyond just the creative brief and in terms of a holistic tackling of client business goals,” she says. She will get started by familiarizing herself both with Diamond and its own brand, and then with the work being done for active clients.

The agency currently counts TD, Tim Hortons, Skip The Dishes and the Score among its clients, as well as more recent wins such as Accor Hotels North America and Ontario Tourism.

“Lori is a dream hire,” says David Diamond, CEO at the agency. “This is really just about bringing our clients the best that the industry has to offer, and the reuniting of Lori and Peter is exactly that.”