Ian Mackenzie, formerly Global Creative AI lead for McCann WorldGroup and CCO and co-founder of Performance Art and FCB/SIX, partners with Ryan Bullock, former CMO and Brand President, to create an agency that blends creativity, technology, data and AI to drive brand growth.
Toronto, May 20, 2025—Ian Mackenzie, a multi-award-winning creative leader known for his innovative work in the creative data space, has partnered with Ryan Bullock, a seasoned marketing executive with past roles as a client-side CMO and agency president, to launch a new independent brand performance agency: Memory.
Memory is built on the belief that creativity, technology, data, and AI should work together to drive meaningful business growth. From the top of the funnel to the bottom, the agency ensures that creative work is not only engaging but also engineered for measurable outcomes. The goal is to create a world-class and technologically innovative creative product achieved through strong collaboration and business partnership.
The agency’s name was chosen for its triad of meanings—its emotional connection to nostalgia and human recall, its technical relevance to data storage and AI-driven intelligence, and its central role in advertising.
“‘Memory’ is inherently human, tied to the way we connect with what matters,” says Ian Mackenzie, co-founder and CCO. “But it’s also deeply technical – the foundation of data storage and retrieval – and the structures that enable advertising to drive recall and influence consumer choice.”
Pushing creativity where it doesn’t usually go.
Memory’s focus is on big, innovative ideas that are built to perform across the entire ecosystem of data, technology and media.
“The twin growth drivers of innovation and creativity aren’t evenly distributed across the customer journey,” says Mackenzie. “Upper-funnel work often prioritizes storytelling at the expense of measurable gains in the short term, while lower-funnel work tends to sacrifice creative ambition to maximize performance metrics, leading to compromise and missed opportunity at both ends.”
Cross-functional creative, accessible innovation and a client-centred ethos.
The agency is founded on a unique set of industry-tested principles:
- A commitment to cross-functional creativity over traditional creative-led agency approaches.
- A belief that marketing innovation should be accessible to all clients at all stages of their technological maturity.
- A client-centred ethos that seeks to move beyond service provision to become a business partnership.
Former CMO looks to build the agency he always wanted to hire when he was a client.
Ryan Bullock, Memory co-founder and Chief Business Officer, brings a dual perspective shaped by leadership roles on both the client and agency sides. He led marketing at The Keg, one of Canada’s most recognized restaurant brands, where he helped drive over 25 per cent in sales growth. He also held senior leadership positions at Recipe Unlimited, The Keg’s parent company, where he managed complex marketing portfolios at scale.
Known for his collaborative style and ability to build long-term partnerships, Bullock brings a strategic mindset to the agency’s client relationships and growth strategy. Complementing his client-side experience is his tenure as Partner and President at the independent agency Juliet. With a deep understanding of the pressures enterprise marketers face and the realities of growing brands in competitive categories, Bullock helps bridge client priorities with agency delivery. For smaller and mid-sized brands, he provides executive-level brand expertise from both sides of the table, positioning Memory as an embedded extension of the client’s team and offering strategic guidance across PR, social, advertising, loyalty, and beyond.
Having been a CMO and brand president, Bullock has walked a mile in his clients’ shoes. He understands what real partnership looks like and how to achieve it from day-to-day collaboration to final delivery.
“Agency and client businesses often operate with different priorities. New business pitches, award circuits, talent churn, shifting technologies, and revenue pressure can dominate the agency side. But none of that matters if we lose sight of what matters most: delivering real value and results for our client partners,” says Bullock. “At Memory, I’m committed to building a business culture that balances creativity with true client centricity—two elements that should always work in tandem, never in conflict.”
World-class creativity, technology and results.
Mackenzie has a consistent record of delivering big, bold, social, data and tech-enabled ideas for clients. In 2013, he co-created the influential “Our Food. Your Questions.” radical transparency platform for McDonald’s. Since then, he has led a string of influential campaigns, including the dynamic data visualization “Destination Pride” for PFLAG, – a globally recognized early pillar in the creative data space; “Go Back To Africa”, “Black Elevation Map” and “See You There” for Black & Abroad; the e-comm platform “Publicly Traded” for LifeStyles Healthcare; the generative AI B2B campaign “The Greatest Guide” for Grupo Bimbo; the AI-driven “Hofmeister Kink” for BMW; and, most recently, “Save Big” for WWF. He has won Grand Prix-level recognition at every major global award show, including a Grand Prix in Creative Data at Cannes, a Black Pencil at D&AD, Best of the Best at One Show, and a Global Grand Effie.
Memory’s three meanings:
Memory is powerfully emotional.
Story-driven, experiential, essentially human, and emotionally loaded, it connects us to what’s important. This is a nod to the agency’s ambitions for high creativity and emotive storytelling.
Memory is deeply technical.
Measured in bytes and yottabytes, collected across customer journeys and retrieved from vast data lakes by advanced computational systems. The agency’s passion for and global expertise in data, technology, automation and AI.
Memory is at the heart of advertising.
Ads that forge strong memory structures increase the likelihood that consumers will retrieve the brand when making purchasing decisions. The agency promises tangible results against marketing’s core objectives.
About Memory:
Memory is a full-service brand performance agency founded by Ian Mackenzie and Ryan Bullock. Through a systems-level integration of creativity, data, technology and AI, Memory helps brands build meaningful connections with consumers while driving measurable business results. For more information, visit memorycreative.com
