When Ari Elkouby was named the new CCO of Dentsu Creative Canada this week, company CEO Patrick Hounsell cited his “omni-channel thinking” as a key reason for the appointment.
For example, Elkouby tells strategy, commerce and creative commerce is a “fascinating, interesting field” that hasn’t been given its creative due.
“There’s this overarching belief that creativity lives at the upper funnel,” he says, and that lower down, things become more pragmatic and lifeless.
While connected commerce might not necessarily require setting up a 20-person offering, Elkouby says that when answering briefs, Dentsu’s philosophy will be to think through the entire customer journey so consumers aren’t disconnected at any point “once (they) get closer to the register.”
Sports marketing as a form of connection also resonates strongly with Elkouby. He likens fandom to brand loyalty.
“There’s a lot of shared emotion that comes from being a fan of a league or a sport and being a fan of a brand.”
“I think when you look at just individuals on a personal basis, I think they probably have their own proclivities and things that they like to lean into – some passions of theirs – and those kind of manifest into categories,” says the self-described Maple Leafs fanatic. “So, things like sports marketing, for instance, is one that is a passion of mine, and we’d love to do more of that (at Dentsu).”
As a father of a little girl, Elkouby says it’s been particularly amazing to see the evolution of women’s sports in the past three years.
The growth of the PWHL, NSL and WNBA present both a sports-marketing opportunity and a chance to create new industries, messaging and sponsorship infrastructures from the ground up, he says.
Brand building of any type benefits from the kind of “rigorousness to Canadian thinking” that Elkouby says is required to execute marketing that can travel into other markets or different languages.
“I think that’s something that is a superpower of Canada,” he says.
The scrappy characteristic comes to the forefront when agencies have to deal with tighter budgets or turn to tools like AI for a helping hand.
When it comes to AI, Elkouby says it’s a great tool to overcome writer’s block, create moodboards, animatics for testing and even mock jingles.
“I find digital puppeteering like Act-One by Runway are making Pixar quality animation accessible for marketers for the first time,” he says. “But where I think AI really shows its value is in creating stories that never could have been told prior to its inception. (The Patriot Love Foundation’s) Remastered Memories are a great example of this.”
However, in quoting Disney CEO Bob Iger, Elkouby says that because AI is trained on what’s come before, original thinking remains a blind spot for the technology that can become an issue.
Original thought remains reliant on human intelligence and good creative that puts human insight first resonates more broadly, he says.
Elkouby believes Dentsu Creative has the ability to go toe-to-toe with anyone on the human-insight front.
He says whether it’s trade wars or consolidation, Dentsu can lean into its agency network – which includes Dentsu Creative, Dentsu X, Carat, iProspect, Merkle – and leverage its powerful human assets to navigate game-changing disruptors such as AI.
Marketing, he emphasizes, will continue to be a people business.
