It’s been a busy year for FCB Canada and we’re not talking about the work required to keep its awards shelf structurally sound after winning 194 trophies this year.

No, the agency has been busy adding a ton of creative and strategic talent, as well as a new leadership team for FCB/Six after parent co. IPG decided their shop’s data-driven model was so effective it needed to be shared with the world under the Performance Art shingle.

In July 2021, SVP, GM Priyanka Goswami, SVP operations and agency development Grace McCann and ECD Rob Sturch took over from former FCB/Sixers Andrea Cook, Ian Mackenzie and Elizabeth Sellors, who moved over to Performance Art.

And although FCB/Six remains a separate division within FCB, it’s actually become quite difficult to separate the efforts of the sister shop from those of the agency at large, says Tyler Turnbull, CEO of FCB North America. He says FCB has, over the years, increasingly focused on developing more digital-led and data-driven work for its clients.

The results can certainly be seen in work for the Canadian Down Syndrome Society (CDSS) – from the search-based “Down Syndrome Answers” campaign in 2016 that relied on intercepting queries with educational videos, to training Google’s speech recognition model using the voices of people with Down syndrome in “Project Understood” in 2020, to FCB’s most recent effort this year, when it used the “Mindsets” app to gather fitness data and prove that exercise improves cognitive function.

This approach of building tools and platforms that evolve and continue to feed CDSS’s creative strategy is by design. The agency in general has been steering away from creating “off-off campaigns and executions” for clients, says Goswami, and moving more toward sustainable platforms, which “have the opportunity to build on, adapt and pivot in a way that [has] the flexibility to change with the times.”