Michael Kasprow (pictured, left) has joined Proximity Canada as executive creative director in Toronto.

Kasprow was most recently partner and executive director of innovation at Toronto agency Union, which merged with his shop Trapeze a year ago. Kasprow founded Trapeze in 1999 and has also worked as a creative director for Microsoft’s Design Expo.

“When you take a look across the business, there’s not a lot of people who’ve been in digital and CRM for almost two decades,” says Adrian Capobianco (pictured, right), president of Proximity Canada. “If we describe ourselves, it’s as a data-driven creative agency, so digital and CRM are always going to get more important, for us and across the industry. Hiring someone like Mike and having folks with that depth of experience will help us deliver that for clients.”

Capobianco joined the agency himself earlier this year following the departure of Tyler Turnbull in September. Shortly after Turnbull’s depature, SVP and ECD Jon Finkelstein was laid off as part of a creative restructuring at Proximity and BBDO.

While Kasprow’s hiring is unrelated to Finkelstein’s departure, Capobianco says the ECD position had been open since he joined, and the executive team has been taking its time to find someone with the right experience in data and CRM to fill it. While data and CRM expertise is nothing new for Proximity’s offering, Capobianco says the agency has been reinforcing that expertise as it moves forward, both in Canada and globally, pointing to its place on this year’s Warc 100 list as evidence that it has been an effective path to go down.

In other staffing news from Proximity, group technical director Darrin Patey left for TBWA\Toronto, with VP and director of project management Grace McCann joining SapientNitro.

With files from Josh Kolm