Jordan Doucette is leaving her role as chief creative officer at Leo Burnett Chicago to join the fast-growing Toronto agency No Fixed Address as a partner.
“From the beginning, we’ve set our sights on the world stage,” said NFA CEO Serge Rancourt in a statement announcing Doucette’s hire. “Jordan represents the kind of unique creative talent that can truly elevate our product across the board and help us get to where we want to be.” Doucette will start with the agency in April.
Dave Federico and Josh Budd remain as NFA’s chief creative officers. The agency said that Doucette, along with Federico, Budd and chief strategy officer Dino Demopoulos, will decide how to divide their responsibilities over the agency’s growing platforms.
The hiring of Doucette—an accomplished creative with experience at one of the most iconic ad agencies in the business, responsible for massive American consumer brands—is a significant move for an agency that has already been on an upward trajectory for three years.
NFA opened its doors in late 2016, and has grown to 120 employees across its creative, digital, media, PR and healthcare offerings—all of which have shown growth in the last year. Clients include Dairy Farmers of Ontario, Questrade, J.P. Wiser’s, Mattamy Homes and Little Caesars.
“Hiring Jordan will help us focus on the future, NFA’s vision and our plans to grow across North America,” said NFA president Dave Lafond. “Dave and Josh have done an outstanding job the past two years as we scaled quickly, and will continue to lead creative for the agency working closely with our clients.”
Doucette’s move to NFA is the third significant creative change in Canada in the past week, following Zulu Alpha Kilo’s hire of Wain Choi, and Carlos Moreno leaving Cossette for an undisclosed new job.
The bulk of Doucette’s career has been spent at Taxi, where she rose to executive creative director and eventually chief creative officer over 13 years. She left for a little more than one year in the middle of that run to become creative director at Edelman, returning to Taxi in 2015.
She moved to Chicago in early 2018, as executive VP and ECD overseeing the Kellogg account. She later helped pitch and lead Kraft masterbrand work and Coors Light. (Doucette cites “Kraft now, pay later,” below, as one of the projects she’s most proud of from her time at Leo.) She was promoted to chief creative officer last August following the departure of Britt Nolan to DDB.
Her time at Leo Burnett, and successes working on big brands at such a large agency is a “moment in my career that I will definitely never forget,” she said. “It reminded me that despite the large size—750 people and a creative department of 300—a focus on people, work and clients is still the key to being successful.”
She said that her “next big step” is to draw on her experiences at Leo Burnett and Taxi under Zak Mroueh—where, she said, she learned her relentless focus on the creative product—to help shape an agency. “I was thinking about coming back but I wouldn’t have done so without finding my next dream job,” she said of NFA.
Doucette recalled meeting with Lafond shortly after he had launched NFA, when he showed her work they had done for Disney tied to Father’s Day in 2017. “He made this lovely piece of content and I was so impressed, it was so amazing. His belief in creativity and that’s how he’s going to grow his agency, I’ll never forget that moment,” she said.
While she talked to bigger networks about creative jobs here, her goal was to do something different. “I love the work but I also love helping build,” she said. “So I’m excited to tackle some business things, cultural things, pitching and shaping the agency. So it’s way more than a creative job for me.”
While Doucette hasn’t worked with Federico and Budd before, she praised the work they’ve done for NFA. “I think they are doing an amazing job, beloved by clients,” she said. “I think what they are doing is great, but I hope it gives me bandwidth to kind of dream about what’s next for the agency.”
