About

Curious.
Creative.
Technical.

Twenty years of growth and learning at the intersection of creativity, technology, and human behaviour.

Based in Toronto, Ontario MBA, London Business School BA, McGill University Bilingual — English & French
Ira Dubinsky

My career has never followed a straight line and I'm proud of that. I've worked in politics, consumer goods, global retail, quick service restaurants, enterprise technology, and DTC e-commerce. Different categories, different scales, different challenges. But the through-line has always been the same: how do you build something people actually want to engage with?

I learned brand at Unilever: properly, rigorously, on one of the most respected brand-building operations in the world. I learned scale at Marks & Spencer, running marketing across 55 countries and a £20M Christmas campaign. I learned performance and franchise complexity at KFC. I learned what it means to take a technical product to market at Peak AI. And I've been leading DTC and the modern e-commerce stack at StickerYou.

Before all of that, I spent six years helping build the brand of a political party, starting as a scheduling assistant and ending up helping to direct a national campaign that took the NDP from 13 seats to Official Opposition. That experience was about building belief in something from the ground up, on a tight budget, against the odds, and it shaped everything that came after it.

Earlier still: I worked at Adobe, and before that built websites for local businesses as a teenager in Montreal. The interest in technology as a creative tool has never gone away.

01
Curiosity about how people decide
Psychology, persuasion, framing, the architecture of a message... I've always been drawn to the question of what actually moves people and why. Marketing is applied behavioural science as much as it is creativity, and I find that combination endlessly compelling.
02
Creativity as craft
Marketing is fundamentally a creative discipline: copy, design, photography, film, the way a message is structured and delivered. I'm not an artist or a designer, but I've spent twenty years developing creative judgment, and I know the difference between work that lands and work that doesn't.
03
Technology as an amplifier
The tools change constantly and I love keeping up. Every new capability creates new ways to do the above two things better. The fundamentals of brand and human behaviour haven't changed. The means of reaching people, measuring impact, and personalising at scale have changed enormously.
2024–now
VP Marketing & E-commerce
StickerYou · Toronto
2022–2024
Director, Product Marketing
Peak AI · Remote
2019–2022
Director of Marketing
KFC · UK & Canada
2013–2019
Head of Marketing, Various Roles
Marks & Spencer · London, UK
2011–2013
Brand Manager
Unilever / Dove · London, UK
2005–2011
Senior Campaign Strategist
NDP / Jack Layton · Ottawa
Early career
Marketing & Digital
Entrepreneur, then Adobe
Brand & Product
Brand strategy Brand positioning & purpose Category narrative Storytelling Competitive intelligence Qualitative & quantitative research New product development Roadmap planning Product marketing Go-to-market strategy Product launch Analyst relations
Digital & Performance
Digital marketing Growth marketing Paid search/PPC Google Ads Meta Ads Manager LinkedIn Campaign Manager TikTok Ads Display SEO / AEO Media strategy & buying Attribution Media mix modelling Promotional planning
Creative & Content
Creative briefing & development Copywriting Editing Advertising production Graphic design & photography Content strategy Adobe Creative Cloud Canva Figma
Analytics & Data
Google Analytics / GA4 BigQuery Looker Studio PowerBI Tableau Data visualization First party data strategy ETL pipelines
MarTech & Commerce Infrastructure
Headless CMS architecture API-driven systems Tag management & data flow Analytics stack implementation Site merchandising Conversion rate optimisation UX/UI User research Customer experience Customer service Personalization Site search Klaviyo Shopify Salesforce Contentful Contentstack
SEO & Web
Semrush Ahrefs Google Search Console Google Tag Manager Server-side GTM Leaflet.js
Leadership
Team leadership Cross-functional collaboration Coaching & mentoring Agency management P&L ownership
Productivity & Collaboration
Notion Asana Monday Wrike Excel / Google Sheets