From Left to right: Jared Stein, Caroline Friesen and Robbie Percy
Creative agency Wieden+Kennedy has named Caroline Friesen and Robbie Percy as executive creative directors at its Toronto office.
The duo will join Jared Stein, who assumed the role of president at W+K Toronto in January, on the office’s leadership team. Friesen and Percy will report to global CCO Karl Lieberman as they officially start on at the agency on Monday.
For the past four years Friesen and Percy held partner and group creative director roles at independent agency Rethink, where they led creative on Molson Coors and IKEA.
They will now partner with Stein and the broader Ford and McDonald’s leadership teams to build on the creative foundations W+K has developed in the Canadian market. Friesen and Percy will also focus on growing the office to support current clients and incoming new business opportunities, according to a news release.
“When we hire creative leaders for a Wieden office, beyond looking for wonderful and talented people, it’s important to us that the collective leadership team has a real connection to the local culture, and an ability to break into it through the work,” Lieberman said. “[They] have a deep understanding of all the awesome and distinctive creative opportunities Toronto presents, plus a great track record of getting to the kind of ideas that create conversation out in the real world.”
Recent work from the pair includes the “See My Name” campaign for Molson Coors, which updated PWHL jersey designs to make players’ more visible.
The duo also recently developed a playful late-night social stunt campaign for IKEA to slide into troubled sleepers’ DMs with a simple “U Up?” text and deliver new IKEA mattresses to those who responded. “The Unburnable Book” campaign for Penguin Random House produced a fireproof edition of the frequently banned novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” in a statement against censorship.
Friesen and Percy have earned recognition from Cannes Lions, The One Show and D&AD for their creative work and both have served as jury members for The One Show, ADCs and AICP.
