Grey Names Ron Lewis Group Creative Director of Health and Wellness

Ron Lewis has left McCann Health to take the group creative director position at Grey Health & Wellness, where he will head up a team to help grow the health division. He will also continue his efforts with the talent portal Diverse Creatives. “We are excited to welcome Ron to our absolutely booming Health & Wellness team,” said Justine Armour, chief creative officer of Grey New York. “We are seeing so much creative opportunity in this space, and Ron brings leadership, energy and creative ambition to match ours.” Lewis told Adweek he made the move to Grey as a challenge, where he could test his skills with leading a group while shaping his role with the agency's growing health practice. Coming from a digital creative background, he also relished working with AKQA Group, which merged with Grey late last year. “When I was looking to make a move, the fact that there was an opportunity for me to interact and engage with AKQA and help bring [digital] into the health practice was very attractive,” Lewis said. Lewis was raised in Barbados and moved to New York after college. He launched his career at McCann Erickson, having won a 4A’s Multicultural Advertising Internship, and he still champions diversity in the industry. A continued focus on DEI Lewis founded Diverse Creatives with VMLY&R ecd Walter T. Geer III in mid-2020 and said he is “1,000%” dedicated to continuing to work toward the site’s objectives of spotlighting creatives of color, helping further their careers. He and Geer talked about the site a year before its launch, but when they saw the police killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests, they knew they had to jumpstart the effort. “It’s definitely something that our industry needed,” said Lewis, adding that Diverse Creatives is seeing an uptick in business from recruiters and hiring managers utilizing the site more, with creatives of color landing positions, getting mentoring and gaining skills. This year, he and Geer will look to add a category search option and other enhancements, as well as building more awareness of the site. While Diverse Creatives isn’t tied to Lewis’ job at Grey, he hopes to be a voice of diversity and inclusion at the company. Grey currently has an employee resource group called InteGREYted, which Lewis said he would like to contribute to and will scout for other ways to contribute. The company previously celebrated National Coming Out Day and encouraged its LGBTQ+ employees to tell their stories. While he gets settled at Grey, he and Geer will continue to run Diverse Creatives, with no current plans to sell the business, because “we think the reason that we have the members we have now is because it’s being run by two creatives of color,” which lets people trust what they are doing.