This year, Media in Canada is approaching its annual Media Leader of the Year program a little differently. We’ve decided to celebrate Canada’s leaders-in-the-running, publishing profiles on each of the four nominees for 2023. The overall winner will be announced at the Media Innovation Awards on November 29, but in the meantime, check out our final nominee, Starcom/Publicis’ Christine Saunders below. Our first and second nominees, OMD’s Cathy Collier, GroupM’s Kevin Johnson, and Dentsu’s Sarah Thompson were revealed earlier this week.

Asked what she would credit a Media Leader of the Year nomination to, Christine Saunders, CEO of Starcom and CMO of Publicis Groupe Canada, starts with her team.

“I’ve built an enviable, strong management team over the time I’ve been here,” says Saunders, noting that it will be 15 years in February. “We look around the table at each other, and we’re just giddy with how we work together, and how we trust each other.”

To bolster and recognize both leadership as well as team members, Saunders implemented initiatives like the Star Awards and Shining Star designations. The first recognizes work her team produces, celebrating it agency-wide. The second identifies peer-nominated, “over-and-above” contributions people are making, called out in twice-monthly town hall meetings. 

“We’re not creating widgets. We’re not a factory. People are our product at the end of the day,” she says, adding that her role as CEO and CMO is to have an almost single-minded focus on her people. “If we get that right, and have the right talent, everything else flows from there.” 

To further showcase the agency’s talent and thought leadership, Saunders also initiated a digital council positioned to shepherd work and commission research around issues like a “Cookieless World” or the “Attention Economy.” 

She also runs a strategy council, which has generated studies like This is Canada – released in partnership with Angus Reid last year, providing insights on the opportunities, successes and challenges immigrants encounter when moving to Canada and how brands can better understand and connect with them – as well as the agency’s PubliSees series, which generates quarterly analyses around trending topics (like AI and sport) for clients.

Saunders’ single-minded focus on employees helped lead to a re-engineering of how the company communicates, the benefits they give their employees (featuring unique elements like benefits starting immediately, and $5K annually for mental health coverage), along with revamping the culture overall. There’s no magic button for that, but Saunders says it was something that had to start at the top. Despite being part of a large holding company, she says it’s important to have “an entrepreneurial spirit that lets each country do their own thing.” 

More specifically, this refers to things like return-to-office (RTO) policies, something which Saunders says she can determine here in Canada. There isn’t an official RTO action in effect, but she does say that’s also part of being a good leader: being able to balance flexibility with productivity. 

In Toronto, Saunders spearheaded an office footprint reduction focused on collaborative spaces versus dedicated workspaces. “The idea was flexibility,” Saunders says. Like many companies, in 2020 they started hiring from around the country, “which was a great opportunity to get outside of our Toronto-centric bubble and get a point of view from planners and strategy people from coast-to-coast, reflecting all of Canada,” and they continue to embrace that mentality.

As far as actual client work, Saunders says it was also important to reinforce what she calls a triangle of great partnerships between the client, as well as its media and creative partners. “The magic only really happens when you have that triangle relationship where everyone is driving for great.”

In the past year, Saunders was attached to client wins including Ancestry, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, and the NFL. As far as other agency accolades go, under Saunders’ leadership, Publicis Groupe Canada/Starcom was awarded “Great Place to Work” in 2023, and was featured as one the 2023 Best Workplaces in Canada (1000+ employees), 2023 Best Workplaces With Most Trusted Executive Teams, and 2023 Best Workplaces For Women.