In Conversation with Aaron Starkman

Aaron currently leads Rethink nationally as its Chief Creative Officer. Aaron has helped lead the agency to become The Effies Independent Agency of the year for the last 2 years(North America). In 2019, Aaron helped lead Rethink to win Canada’s Agency of the year, Design Agency of the year and Silver Digital Agency of the year. This was the best showing for any agency in the history of the competition (Rethink just repeated that same result in 2020.) Rethink’s work under Aaron’s Creative direction has resulted in NBC News and The Huffington Post referring to the agency as "viral specialists". Some of that work includes the recent Heinz puzzle and tilted label campaign, the Cannes Lions winning Molson passport fridge, the Cannes Lions winning UBER Breathalyzer, and WestJet’s Guinness world record breaking Desert Roulette. Before joining Rethink, Aaron made his mark at Crispin Porter + Bogusky writing for and later heading up creative as Chief Creative Officer in Canada. Some highlights there include his "Prison Visitor" commercial for Vim - The most awarded cleaning product commercial of the past 25 years; Canada's first ever media gold lion in Cannes for Corus; Canada's first and only radio gold in Cannes for IKEA - for an ad in a long standing campaign that's been deemed the most successful in Canadian history according to ipsos. Aaron is currently the #1 ranked Creative Director in Canada, he’s the the only Canadian creative to have won gold Lions in Cannes for at least 3 different clients and is on Adweek’s top 13 Global Creative Leaders list. Other than industry accolades, Aaron’s work has been singled out by the mainstream press. (Buzzfeed named one of his ads the # 1 commercial in the history of the Cannes festival, CNN and Jimmy Kimmel have discussed work he’s led multiple times and Ellen Degeneres declared one of his tv spots as her 'favorite of all time') Aaron has been a regular industry contributor by judging award shows (The One Show & Cannes as highlights), writing columns, speaking at events locally and as far away as Seoul, Korea and he also tries to inspire young industry professionals from around the globe with his podcast, IOFA- Adweek’s advertising podcast of the year.