Greatest Common Factory has named Courtney Tsitouris Chief Creative Officer, the first time the 15-year-old agency has had one. Tsitouris takes over for John Trahar, GCF co-founder and former head of strategy and creative, who died in November. She is already repositioning the agency as a growth fuel company, retooling its tech stack, and helping win strategy assignments.
Tsitouris brings a history of brand and agency innovation to GCF, which is best known for breaking such brands as Nike Jordan and SafeAuto out of the doldrums. For more than two decades, she’s led national TV, social, digital and content campaigns for Procter & Gamble and other category leaders while running CRM programs for more than 130 million people and improving conversions by as much as 45%.
Most recently, as Interim CEO of Jumpsuit, she rebuilt the agency into a network of freelancers who embed within client teams to accelerate agency-client collaboration. At the same time, she ran creative for Secret, Gillette, and Olay. Her work included Secret’s Smell Like You Didn’t campaign and the Gillette Perfection campaign.
“Courtney embodies our flexibility and commitment to make things better,” said Melisa Smith, CFO at Greatest Common Factory. “She has a knack for finding and energizing a brand’s wider appeal, which is key to our continued success. And she knows what it’s like to be in a client’s shoes.”
Tsitouris is an entrepreneur in her own right. She founded the Cincinnati Food + Wine Classic that brought nationally recognized chefs to Cincinnati to celebrate the city as a dining destination. She also founded and ran a publishing company, City Stories, ghostwriting two cookbooks for Cincinnati chefs and winning a Gold Addy for a video series on the Cincinnati food scene.
At GCF, Tsitouris leads a lean team of veterans built for speed, scale, and substance on such clients as USAA and The Venetian. Already she has helped land a long-term strategy assignment for USAA Perks and helped reposition The Venetian as a dining destination, filling rooms to near capacity. Also, she is creating a proprietary human AI approach to creative strategy, GCF Brain, that employs custom versions of more than a dozen popular tools.
“Great brands are built on great stories,” said Tsitouris. “We have the perfect structure and team to create go-to-market narratives that propel Fortune 500 giants and high-growth disruptors alike. By focusing on the intersection of insight and instinct, we find combustible ideas that generate explosive growth.”
