David Leonard's Biography

David Leonard

President & COO
DDB Canada
Canada

David started his advertising career on the other side of the camera starring in a Nabisco Shreddies commercial when he was 12 years old. Fast forward 35 years later, he has enjoyed 25 years in the communications business in successive leadership roles across Canada on both the agency and client side.

Following his undergraduate studies at SFU, He started his career, literally in the mailroom of EXPO 86 Corporation helping to bring the world to Vancouver. A 2-year stint with a local Vancouver agency then gave him his introduction to account service. From there, David rose through the Account Service ranks spending 7 years with JWT in Toronto working on Pepsi, Warner Lambert, Toshiba and Teledyne, then in Vancouver on Scott Paper and Vincor.

David first joined Palmer Jarvis in 1993 as an Account Director and over the next 5 years ran most every account in the agency including Labatt, Telus, Fairmont Hotels, SunRype and Nabob. He became a Vice President in 1996.

In 1998, David moved to Calgary as Director of Marketing Communications for Canadian Airlines. With a staff of 36, and 5 agency partners under his direction, he was pivotal in the re-launch of the airline under the Proud Wings brandmark and the global launch of the OneWorld alliance. When the airline was absorbed by Air Canada, David was invited to return to Palmer Jarvis DDB to run the McDonald's account for Western Canada.

In February of 2001, he became President & CEO of Arnold Worldwide and for the next 4 years drove the successive growth and creative stature for the Arnold brand in Canada with clients like Volkswagen, monster.com, BMO, GlaxoSmithKline and the United Way.

David re-joined DDB Canada as President of the Toronto office in January of 2005 responsible for stewardship of the agency and all integrated companies including Tribal DDB, Radar DDB, DDB Public Relations, Rapp Collins and Karacters Design. In the next 6 years, DDB Canada was awarded Strategy Magazine's Agency of the Year three times.

In February of 2010, David was appointed President & Chief Operating Officer responsible for all of DDB Canada's operations in Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto and Montreal and for driving the next era of the agency's growth as Canada's most creative agency brand.

David has served on the Board of The American Marketing Association, The Institute of Communications and Advertising and chaired The Cassies in both 2009 and 2010. He currently serves on the board of the Pacific Salmon Foundation, The Oakville Club and the Toronto Crime Stoppers Community Advisory Committee.

Life outside of work and community is consumed with an active family that skis, races their sailboat and constantly chases 2 golden retrievers.

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