Almost five years ago, Maryann Rusnak became a triathlete at roughly the same time she joined Spark Foundry Canada as an executive. In working her way up to her current role as president, she has come to see these two pursuits as complementary. The idea of training across disciplines with the goal of becoming incrementally better at all of them is the closest analogy she has found for what she is trying to build at the agency.
“Don’t be scared to move outside your lane,” she says. “That is what I keep bringing back into how we think about things.”
To create a ‘Wow’ moment for Hot Wheels fans, Spark brought the Mercedes-Benz CLA art installation to life, turning heads and driving brand impact at the 2026 Canadian International Auto Show in Toronto.
As the fastest growing agency in Canada, with a talent base of nearly 200 across Toronto, Montreal and Windsor, and client partnerships such as MolsonCoors, Kimberly Clark and Home Hardware, Spark Foundry Canada is not a startup, but it has the soul of one. And that’s what the agency is determined to protect as it grows. “That startup mentality – the agility, the thinking, the lack of fear about breaking things – is so important for us to maintain, regardless of how much we grow or what size we become.”
For Home Decoors, Spark took a bold alternative to the Big Game, driving breakthrough awareness, viral momentum and 100% positive sentiment through interactive experiences with the brand.
The practical expression of this mindset is a deliberate restructuring of how teams are built. Rusnak has been moving Spark away from the traditional planner model toward creating “multisport athletes”: people who can speak to the totality of a client’s business – from data and technology through to channel planning and measurement – rather than a team where each person specializes in only one thing. Research, insights and analytics, long treated as peripheral supporting roles, are now embedded at the core.
For Sour Patch Kids, a Toronto-wide, glow-powered OOH takeover, anchored by Canada’s first-ever illuminated streetcar, transformed transit, nightlife and entertainment corridors into a sharable Gen Z experience.
This shift is driven by what clients are asking for, even when they can’t articulate it precisely. “They might have five agencies or one agency, but at the end of the day, they want one integrated marketing strategy and plan grounded in identity to drive their business forward,” Rusnak says. That has put Spark in a natural position of influence within inter-agency teams, the multi-partner structures brands like Kenvue use to orchestrate across creative, media, influencer commerce and PR. Rather than waiting for direction, Spark shows up having identified the central business challenge to work with all partners to solve it together.
For Starbucks, Spark focused on loyalty membership growth, tracking frequency of purchase to increase both membership and spend per member by double digits in a spring campaign.
Spark Foundry’s recent work with Starbucks illustrates what this model looks like in practice. Rather than measuring success through impressions or click-through rates, Spark rebuilt its go-to-market approach around loyalty membership growth, tracking frequency of purchase within specific cohorts as the primary KPI. A recent spring campaign grew loyalty membership 12% year over year and increased spend per member by approximately 11%.
“A lot of agencies talk about effectiveness,” Rusnak says. “The key difference is the action behind it. To us, it means focusing on what we are delivering to the client business.” That commitment has been formally recognized through Spark’s APG effectiveness certification making them one of the first media agencies in Canada to receive the accreditation, following deep investment in WARC and IPA training across teams.
The culture that makes this possible is built around permission to fail. Rusnak calls all-staff meetings “bonfires” and holds regular fireside chats at every level of the agency, explicitly encouraging people to challenge existing models and propose solutions beyond how things have always been done. This approach was shaped in part by her time at Expedia, where she learned to move fast, test and adapt.
AI-powered “Weather Person Rachel” delivered more than 422 hyper- localized videos, scaling Home Hardware’s national reach with the same community-first precision as its stores.
In a media industry being reshaped by fragmentation, AI, and clients who want business partners rather than channel executors, Rusnak is betting that an agency is built to last when it never stops behaving like it has something to prove.
Spark’s 10K team sweated it out at the annual Publicis Fun Run.
CONTACT:
Maryann Rusnak
President
maryann.rusnak@sparkfoundryww.com
The 2026 A-Listers:
Pomp & Circumstance: Taking big swings
Fuse Create: Turning heads everywhere
Klick Health: Built to think differently
Pendo: The next-generation agency partner
Starcom Canada: Building a (people) movement
