Less than a week after Canada’s Lowe Roche announced new leadership in the form of co-presidents Marie-Lise Campeau and Jeff Dack, the agency has laid off some of the key members of its team including its executive creative director and its longest-serving employee.
In case you missed it, the shift began in February as the larger Lowe and Partners organization pushed out CEO Monica Ruffo after more than five years. At the time, sources told us that the announcement surprised the team during an all-staff meeting and that many feared for their own jobs moving forward.
We can confirm that the departing employees include ECD Jane Murray, Director of Production Beth MacKinnon, and office manager Marian Shanahan.
A separate source tells us that the agency also laid off a top-ranking account executive and all of its financial staffers. The total number affected is unclear at the moment.
Here’s the official statement from the agency’s new co-presidents, Campeau and Dack:
“The nature of our business requires us to constantly adapt to an ever-changing landscape. Occasionally this includes restructuring to best serve our current clients and position ourselves for the future. It is never easy to part ways with a colleague; in fact, it’s the toughest part of this business and pains us all to see someone go.”
Some background on the departing staffers: Murray, who has spent more than twenty years in the ad industry to date, wrote copy for MacLaren McCann before serving as ACD at Ogilvy, CP+B, and Sid Lee; she then worked as a creative director in the TBWA organization before joining Lowe in 2012, and her recent work includes PSAs for clients such as Canadian Cancer Society, The Missing Children’s Network, and The Power of Movement. She also helped create the 2013 project that confirmed a few obvious things: ad folks drink nine times as much bourbon and watch nearly twice the porn as your average Canadian. (They’re also almost two times as likely to mute the ads on live TV.)
MacKinnon spent more than a decade in production at TAXI Toronto before heading to Lowe; a source calls her “a veteran of the agency” and tells us that Executive Assistant/Office Manager Shanahan was Lowe’s longest-serving employee; she spent more than two decades with the organization.
No word on their replacements.