Strategy and systems,
built together.
Creative Strategic pairs senior marketing leadership with digital systems expertise — the full-stack team growing organizations need, without the full-time overhead.
Meet the people behind the work.
A tight-knit partnership built on complementary strengths. One side drives strategy, brand, and client relationships. The other keeps the digital and media engine clean, stable, and moving.
Vic Chen
15+ years of senior marketing leadership spanning Rogers, TC Media, Youthography, and a roster of B2B, non-profit, and DTC clients. Vic embeds directly into your organization as an accountable marketing executive — not an advisor, not a deck-deliverer, but someone in the work with you.
James
A systems thinker who moves fluidly between digital infrastructure, audio-visual production, and automation. James keeps the technical engine running — from marketing stack setup and process automation to content production and web stability — so strategy doesn't stall waiting on tools.
Vic Chen
I didn't study marketing. I just kept doing it.
I attended Harris Institute for the Arts in 2004. I went in thinking I'd become an audio engineer. By the end of it, I'd figured out that the marketing and business side was the thing I was actually good at. I was student council president, which should have been a clue.
My first real marketing job was handing out PlayStation 2 flyers in Walmart parking lots and touring mall courts across Canada for Sony. I drove across the country in a van, set up displays, and talked to strangers about video games for months. It was the best possible training in understanding how real people respond to brands — not focus groups, not data, just actual humans in the moment.
Fifteen years of clawing up the ladder
From that first experiential role at Siegel Communications, I moved into Youthography Inc., where I went from promo rep to Senior Manager, Youth Marketing over three years. My clients included Mattel, Adidas, Microsoft (the Zune launch), Ubisoft (Assassin's Creed), Energizer, and dozens more. I managed cross-country tour logistics, staffed and routed promo teams, wrote the proposal decks, managed the budgets, and pitched new business in Los Angeles. I also managed Rockstar Hotel — a multi-floor boutique hotel takeover at the Junos.
After a brief stint at Embrace Productions — sponsoring Tiesto world tour VIP experiences with Heineken and producing a TD Bank college tour — I moved into Rogers Media's Healthcare Group in 2009.
That's where things got interesting. When I started, the team was doing four custom content projects a year, generating under ,000 in revenue. By the time I left in 2016, we were running 30–40 custom projects annually. I built the entire process from scratch — the annual content calendar, custom digital products, CE accreditation programs for pharmacists, branded newsletter series for pharmaceutical clients. I had to drag a team of print media salespeople into the digital era and teach them how to sell things that didn't exist yet on a rate card. Then I built the rate card.
In 2016, I moved into Rogers Wireless as Senior Manager, Brand — owning the brand strategy for everything Rogers said about its network: billboards, TV, radio, digital, social, retail. I worked with Publicis on national campaigns, was in the studio for the radio reads, worked directly with the Disney partnership team on Roam Like Home, and presented results to the CMO and CEO. I learned how enterprise marketing actually runs, and more importantly, where it breaks down.
After Rogers, I joined TC Media (Transcontinental) as Creative Strategist for their financial services publications. I brought in programmatic and retargeted display, built out their continuing education platform for advisors, launched a native podcast series, and created the digital products and rate cards that gave their sales team something worth selling.
When COVID hit and TC Media was acquired, I decided to stop working for other people's marketing priorities.
Creative Strategic: the whole point
I started doing pro bono marketing pitches for friends with small businesses — no strings, just genuine help. The response was good enough that I turned it into a real business. Since then I've worked with Hospice Georgian Triangle (3+ years on retainer, 23% donor growth), Colchester Ridge Estate Winery (full digital rebuild, 300% revenue growth three years running), Canadian Leadership Congress, DawgTag (built from zero to 60% conversion), and others across logistics, finance, and professional services.
The through-line in all of it: listen first, build a strategy that actually fits, then execute relentlessly and measure everything. I've never been interested in marketing that looks good but doesn't move numbers.
Creative Strategic is the vehicle I use to bring that approach to organizations that need senior marketing leadership but can't justify a full-time CMO yet. I work with a small number of clients at a time. When I'm in, I'm actually in — not advisory, not monthly check-ins, but embedded and accountable for outcomes.
What I'm good at
- Brand strategy, positioning, and storytelling
- Fractional CMO & embedded marketing leadership
- Omni-channel campaign planning and execution (social, digital, TV, radio, print, email, video)
- B2B content, thought leadership, and demand generation
- Marketing automation (HubSpot, Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Shopify)
- E-commerce strategy and execution (Shopify, WooCommerce)
- Donor communications and non-profit fundraising campaigns
- Analytics, KPI reporting, and data-driven decision making
- Team leadership, vendor management, and agency direction
- Podcast production, video production, and content creation
- Adobe Creative Suite, WordPress, and the technical side of marketing
James
Fundamentals first. Build what lasts.
James is a systems thinker who operates at the intersection of music, media, and digital infrastructure. Where most people see scattered tools and unclear workflows, he sees structural problems with clean, repeatable solutions — and he builds them.
His background spans audio engineering and music composition, digital media design, web architecture, automation, and analytics. He describes his own approach as a Swiss Army knife mindset — not a generalist in the vague sense, but someone who has genuinely mastered the fundamentals across multiple disciplines and knows exactly when to apply which one.
What he brings to Creative Strategic
At Creative Strategic, James handles the digital and media infrastructure that makes strategic marketing actually executable. That means marketing tech stack setup and management, process automation, analytics configuration, audio and video production, web stability, and content systems — the operational layer that sits between a great strategy and results that show up in the numbers.
He also coaches and trains — whether that's a client team learning a new tool or a creator learning to build a sustainable content system. He believes in teaching through real projects, not abstract lessons. If you're not building something real, you're not really learning.
Together with Vic's marketing leadership, James's systems work means Creative Strategic clients get a team that can think at the executive level and execute at the implementation level — without handoffs, agency markups, or the lag that comes from outsourcing the technical layer to someone who doesn't understand the strategy.
What he's good at
- Digital systems design, automation, and workflow architecture
- Audio production, music composition, and sound design
- Web design, digital stability, and site performance
- Analytics setup, reporting, and data-driven optimization
- Visual hierarchy, branding, and design fundamentals
- Marketing technology stack management
- Coaching, teaching, and client training on tools and systems
- Content production and digital media management
Let's see if we're a fit.
30 minutes. No commitment. Just an honest conversation about where your marketing is and where it could go.
Book Your Free Call →