Ian Mackenzie and Ryan Bullock Launch Indie Brand Performance Agency, Memory
Ian Mackenzie, known for his pioneering work as McCann Worldgroup’s creative AI lead and founder of FCB/SIX, has partnered with former CMO and agency president Ryan Bullock to launch Memory. The new independent agency is built around brand performance, blending creativity, technology, data and AI to deliver measurable outcomes across the full marketing funnel.
Based in Toronto, the agency was founded on the belief that big ideas and smart execution should be achieved through strong collaboration and business partnerships.
“‘Memory’ is inherently human, tied to the way we connect with what matters," says Ian, 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."
The agency’s name reflects a triad of meanings: emotional resonance, technical relevance, and advertising’s ultimate aim – brand recall. That blend of art and science is central to the agency’s positioning.
“There are plenty of great creative agencies out there,” says Ryan, co-founder and chief business officer. “Agencies that deliver classic brand awareness with bold, clever, head-turning ideas. They build compelling brand platforms, craft memorable narratives, and generate buzz that makes brands famous. That kind of work matters.” But, as a former client himself, Ryan also believes that client partners need more than that – the “less traditionally romantic” parts that “drive measurable results”.
Left to right: Ian and Ryan
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“With the pace of technological change, especially in areas like AI, there’s a growing opportunity for agencies to not just keep up but to lead,” he adds. At Memory, they’re focused on both: creating big brand ideas that provide strategic air cover and pairing them with performance work that drives conversion. “We’re not retrofitting our processes to accommodate AI – we’re building our agency at a moment when AI already exists, which allows us to integrate emerging technologies from day one, both in the work we create and in how we create it.”
Memory is founded on three principles: cross-functional creativity over traditional creative-led models; a belief that innovation should be accessible regardless of a client’s tech maturity; and a client-centred ethos that moves beyond service delivery to true business partnership.
Pushing Creativity into New Territory
Ian has consistently delivered tech-enabled, data-driven ideas across major global brands since launching FCB/SIX in 2016. Among his most recognised work are campaigns such as ‘Our Food. Your Questions.’ for McDonald’s, ‘Destination Pride’ for PFLAG, ‘Go Back To Africa’ and ‘Black Elevation Map’ for Black & Abroad, and generative AI work for brands like Grupo Bimbo, BMW and WWF.
Prior to co-founding FCB/SIX alongside Andrea Cook, and later Performance Art, Ian was “more or less” a traditional brand creative with a digital lean. SIX was built on the foundation of a CRM agency, reimagined as a ‘creative data agency’. Pure-play CRM was new to him, but he quickly fell in love with the ways in which marketing automation fundamentals could be used to unlock new ways into traditional big creative ideas.
“Both FCB/SIX and Performance Art built my confidence that with the right stance, a talented cross-functional team, and an agency vision unified to deliver it, there's a wild upside that comes from pushing creativity into places where it hasn’t always thrived,” says Ian.
In many ways, he adds, that is the answer to what he sees as a simple question: what do the prevailing winds say about where creativity ‘doesn’t belong’? “And that’s where I’m motivated to go. In my experience, that’s where the blue ocean, an uncontested market space for creative leadership, is likely to be.”
Ryan brings a dual perspective shaped by senior roles on both the client and agency sides. After starting out at KBS (now Forsman & Bodenfors), he made a significant shift to the client side when he joined The Keg, one of Canada’s best-known restaurant brands. The transition - from supporting the client to becoming the client - gave him a new appreciation for the weight of responsibility that comes with leading a brand.
“It took time to get comfortable leading a marketing team and making those calls,” he says. “But over time, my perspective evolved. I began to shift focus, from judging how subjectively creative a campaign was to asking how to get the most out of our national marketing budget. How could I make the big brand work deliver real business results, not just campaign metrics?”
When he returned to the agency world with Juliet, he found that many of his clients were asking the same questions he used to ask, namely how they could get the most of their brand investments all the way through the funnel. “That’s why I’m so excited to partner with Ian and why we believe Memory is different,” he adds. “We’re built on a creative philosophy that directly addresses what I – and so many other brand leaders – have been looking for: a partner who understands the business reality and can collaborate across the entire funnel, not just at the top or the bottom.”
Ian and Ryan’s partnership was over a decade in the making. They first met at KBS. Ian was the newly hired creative director, and already earning a reputation as one of Canada’s top copywriters, while Ryan was VP of marketing.
While their careers took different paths, they reconnected years later over coffees and catch-ups, quickly realising how closely their views on the industry – and the world – aligned. “What makes us ideal business partners starts with mutual admiration and respect, both for each other’s leadership and for the complementary nature of our skills,” says Ryan. Their experience doesn’t overlap a great deal, and that’s kind of the point.
“I often describe it in sports terms: we aspire to be like a great basketball team,” he adds. “We have distinct roles, we trust each other’s instincts, and we know how to collaborate to win.”
The Meaning Behind the Name
That same sense of teamwork and clarity of roles is echoed in the thinking behind the agency’s name, and the three strategic foundations it’s built on.
First, memory is ‘powerfully emotional’ - a reflection of the agency’s ambition to create story-driven, experiential work that connects on a human level.
Second, memory is ‘deeply technical’. It speaks to the infrastructure of modern marketing – data stored in yottabytes, retrieved from vast digital ecosystems by AI and automation – and the agency’s expertise in this arena.
And finally, memory is ‘at the heart of advertising’. Campaigns that build strong memory structures increase the likelihood of brand recall and influence purchase decisions. For Memory, that means a commitment to delivering not just creativity, but measurable outcomes aligned with marketing’s core objectives.
“For us,” says Ian, “all three of those readings are complementary to our vision for the work we’re setting out to do. Our ambition is emotive brand storytelling that thrives in technical complexity and compels people to act.
“Feel. Think. Do.”
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