One year after its launch in Canada, Dentsu Creative has made a wave of new hires and a promotion spanning its strategy, creative, design, experiential and client services teams, all in response to growing momentum in the Canadian market.

On the creative side, Dentsu has added the formerly freelance duo of Mike Lee and Chris Munnik as ECDs. The pair boast a wealth of experience in the industry at agencies including Theo, Leo Burnett, FCB and McCann. The move cements what had been an existing relationship; Lee and Munnik most recently had been working on a contract basis with Dentsu on its RBC and Subway clients. The pair will work alongside fellow ECDs Maxime Sauté (who joined in February) and Dave Federico (who also joined the agency earlier this year).

Munnik and Lee replace Josh Day and Caitlin Keeley, who departed Dentsu in October of last year and recently joined The Local Collective.

Dentsu Creative has also added a pair of creative directors: Ines de Ninnis, who moves from Ogilvy where she has been working for the past five years in increasingly senior roles across the agency’s offices in Colombia and Toronto; and Craig Ferguson, most recently from Thinkific but who has also worked at agencies including DDB Canada and Taxi.

The agency has also added Ange Chuang, an “up-and-coming Vancouver designer,” as well as Michelle Meng and Karishma Wadia, “a young and highly talented female team with strong experiential background,” according to Dentsu SVP of communications Kate Dobrucki.

On the strategy side, Dentsu has made a number of key additions in recent months, including Patrick Henderson as group strategy director. Henderson, who joined the agency in March, was the strategic mind behind Jems Condoms’ “F#cking Old” campaign, which garnered attention at Cannes. They joined the agency from Zulu Alpha Kilo and now work on clients including Subway, IKEA, Brita, Arterra Wines, LePage, Manulife and CPA Canada.

In addition to Henderson, Dentsu has added Sabrina Lau as a senior strategist. Lau hails from Ogilvy Hong Kong and has worked on clients including Toys”R”Us, Huawei and HSBC. She is joined by Sam McCall, also taking on the role of senior strategist, who moves from Draftline YYZ, Labatt Canada’s in-house agency.

Along with the additions, Dimitra Georgakis, who had been managing director for Dentsu in Quebec, has now been named chief client officer for Dentsu Creative nationally and will work closely with chief creative officer Jordan Doucette and chief strategy officer Rafik Belmesk – who joined the agency late last year – to assure the right employees are assigned to each account from within Dentsu’s network. She will also continue to oversee Dentsu’s Quebec operations, and has pulled together a steering committee for the Quebec market with representation from all of the Dentsu brands, including important business groups such as finance and HR.

The additions are in response to the agency’s growing momentum, including success as international awards shows with nominations for the aforementioned Jems campaign and SkipTheDishes’ “Inflation Cookbook”. Just a year into the merger, the agency has given itself “license for experimentation,” Belmesk tells strategy – essentially acting with a startup mentality, even though it resulted from the merger of “three very established agencies.”

“What we have is the perfect storm,” Doucette elaborates. “We have longstanding clients with whom we have deep relationships and they trust us implicitly. Some have been with us for 30 years. So we have they ability to go to them and ask them if they want to explore our new vision and these big bets with us.”

“In my career, I haven’t had the ability to behave like a startup and entrepreneur but have the breadth and depth of clients we have here to put my vision into motion,” she adds. “It’s been amazing not to face any sort of resistance to how we do it. We’re Dentsu Creative, now – there is no past, only this new thing that we’re building.”