The Wolf Group Canada received a shot in the arm early this year when one of the country's most creatively-driven clients stepped into the role of CEO of the agency's Toronto office.

Rob Guenette has been a marketing presence in Canada for over 15 years, most recently as VP and global advertising director at Molson and is now turning his considerable ardor for advertising to reshaping a shop with a subdued creative profile. One of the first orders of business under the Guenette regime will be reshaping the agency's own brand and toward that end, the shop is said to be in talks to acquire New York- and San Francisco-based Mad Dogs and Englishmen. While Guenette doesn't confirm the Mad Dogs deal, he doesn't deny it either and is effusive about what that shop represents in the ad world: "I will say that Mad Dogs is precisely the type of agency that I would love to either acquire or be associated with, because I think they have some bits in terms of their brand figured out really well. I really love their attitude about strategic planning and what creative is capable of and more importantly, the culture of the agency."

Guenette, who has gained a high profile on the Canadian marketing scene most recently spearheaded the Molson Ex "Had Ex Today" campaign out of HHCL. He had worked for 14 years for Unilever Canada, where he participated in such ad efforts as "Poetry" for Finesse hair products. The spot, created out of Toronto's Taxi and produced through Avion Films depicted a men's support group for the romantically inarticulate, and reaped a Gold Lion at Cannes and some deserved notoriety for breaking away from this category's typical ad fare. Guenette says the move to Wolf represented a desire to apply his accumulated acumen to the agency frontier: "I've always had a passion and interest in advertising and the flow of my career has taken me closer and closer to this point. So over the past years, having worked with a great number of agencies in a variety of countries, I've been collecting bits and pieces of what I consider to be the best practices and molding my attitude and approach to advertising. " Guenette says new business will be a priority for the 40-person Toronto shop, which counts Ultamira financial services, real estate concern Cadillac Fairview, Parmala, Ontario Power Generators and the Ministry of Health among its clients.

He'll also be looking to bolster the shop's strategic planning department. "I think clients want at least two things: strategic planning and creative problem solving," he says.

But he also espouses a commitment to the agency's own branding efforts. "I'm going to bring old-fashioned brand discipline to the brand of this agency. The first client is ourselves, because if we can't convince the marketplace that we can build our own brand, who the hell is going to believe us?" Some of that branding effort "will be wrapped up in an acquisition strategy." "I think if we make the right kind of acquisitions and we take the best pieces of those and combine them with what I and my creative directors (Craig Cooper and Briony Wilson who moved to the shop from BBDO Toronto) have been building as an idea bank ,I think that will manifest in something that will be really interesting."