After more than 30 years in day-to-day creative and production, Normand is now head of creative product at bleublancrouge. His career path lends him the perspective he needs to both evaluate projects better and take a step back. With this distance, he brings fresh insights to the table, but at the same time, he stays in the loop by personally acting as principal copywriter on government accounts.

A talented copywriter, he also has the skill to put to use all of the agency’s creative resources. No small advantage. The fact that he remains fully involved in day-to-day creative and production allows him to ensure that good ideas come to fruition. And the fact that he chooses to position himself at the heart of the creation of societal campaigns as copywriter, inspirer and creative spark allows him to ensure that the creative product incorporates the fundamental positioning as soon as ideas take root.

On a creative level, government accounts have a real complexity to them, bringing extra challenges to the mix that must be taken into account. To give an example of this complexity, for an RRSP campaign for the Department of Finance, Normand came up with a great billboard slogan: “Decrochez”. This slogan illustrated the idea of retirement at the same time as purchasing financial products by phone. However, he decided not to present it to the client. “The government cannot make billboards that say ‘Decrochez’ when it’s fighting against kids dropping out of school,” he concluded. It’s rare to find creative talent with such sensitivity to issues of this kind.

As principal copywriter, he is at the root of all creative concepts. As head of creative product, he is ultimately responsible for the quality and relevance of the agency’s creative products. And all the more so for his own creative products. When, like Normand, you’ve been in the creative industry for over a quarter of a century, you’ve been around the block. You’ve designed, directed and produced campaigns that were both extremely complex, extremely simple and everything in between. You’ve managed million-dollar campaigns and tight-budget campaigns.

Some of Normand’s achievements worthy of mention include his creative supervision in the development of the awareness campaign for domestic violence for the Ministère de la Famille, des Aînés et de la Condition Féminine account; the campaign for the Notaires du Québec in 2007; and the mortgage campaign for the Laurentian Bank in 2007-2008.