Industry veteran Christine Saunders has been appointed to Dentsu Media’s Canadian leadership team. Saunders joins the network as CEO, Media Practice. According to a statement from Dentsu, “Saunders will focus on accelerating the industry-leading agency’s media offering, driving growth through innovation and fuelling collaboration with other Dentsu agencies and offices across the region.”

“It’s going to be a role of collaboration and making sure the brands are working together; they’ve got what they need, and building a winning culture in a place where talent wants to come and stay and be invigorated,” Saunders tells MiC. “The mandate will continue to be having a growth mindset, supporting the Canadian brands of Dentsu and really bringing the teams together, collaboratively nurturing and attracting talent and just making a great place to work across the businesses.”

Saunders said that one of the reasons she was attracted to Dentsu, has been the emphasis it has placed on the Canadian market. “One of the things that I admire about Dentsu is their focus,” she adds. “They’re not distracted by a thousand different sorts of communication channels or businesses or mergers or everything else that’s blowing up. There’s a real lovely focus on media and creative and tech.”

Saunders was most recently CEO at Starcom and Publicis Groupe CMO. In the past four years, Saunders led Starcom to double digit growth, fueled by new business wins as well as organic growth. Starcom was recently named Media Agency of the Year by Adweek. It won the same honour from strategy in 2022.

“Media is proving out more and more to be a driver of business growth,” Saunders said. “We’ve said that for years, and now I think there’s more and more evidence that media is a driver. It’s now it’s an important line item on our budget. You know, the old adage used to be ‘we know that 50% of our, of our ad spend is wasted. We just don’t know which 50%.’ Now we know more and more about how not to waste media dollars.”

According to a spokesperson, Alastair Taylor, CEO of Publicis Media, will act as an interim CEO for Starcom while the agency searches for “a successor that will benefit our teams, clients and partners.”