Simplicity is one of those corporate words that becomes less convincing with every slide devoted to explaining it. Andrew Zimakas used it differently. In a 2013 interview, when asked how the online bank ING DIRECT Canada could keep an advantage while larger rivals spent heavily on digital channels, he began with a single word: “Simplicity.” The answer was plain enough to sound obvious. The career around it shows how difficult it is to practice. Across grocery aisles, software boxes, bank accounts, workplace platforms and urgent-care systems, Zimakas has repeatedly taken on the same unruly material: institutions that know too much, products that do too much, and customers who would prefer to get on with their day.
Today he is EVP and Chief Marketing Officer at Experity, a provider of software and services for the American urgent-care market. His permanent remit, announced in August 2024 after an interim period, covers growth marketing and communications. The products include electronic medical records, practice management, patient engagement, billing, teleradiology and business intelligence. It is a vocabulary capable of making a brochure feel like a tax return. Zimakas’s task is to make the practical value visible without pretending the machinery is simple underneath.
The shelf, the screen and the customer
The first classroom was Procter & Gamble, where Zimakas spent eight years in progressively senior brand management, customer marketing and sales roles. Packaged goods reward clarity brutally. A product has a few seconds to explain itself from a crowded shelf, and the customer owes the brand no patience. He earned President’s Club recognition twice, in 1993 and 1996. That period also overlapped with a part-time MBA at York University’s Schulich School of Business. In 2000, he finished among the program’s three highest cumulative grade-point averages, receiving its Bronze Medal and the William Mercer Scholarship for the highest cumulative GPA among part-time MBA students.
Then the shelf became a screen. Zimakas joined Microsoft in 1999 as group marketing manager for the Home and Retail Division, earning a Gold Star award in 2001, an honor his public profile describes as recognizing the company’s top two per cent of employees. He moved to AOL Canada, where he served as vice president and general manager of Enhanced Services, and then to Travelex to lead marketing and public relations across the Americas. The products changed quickly. The recurring discipline was deciding which part of a complicated offer deserved to enter a customer’s mind.
By 2007, he had crossed from operator to adviser, becoming a partner and brand adviser at Level5 Strategy Group and managing director at Brand Finance Canada. His later publication, “Navigating the Digital Disconnect,” argued that a brand is larger than a logo or campaign and that the chief executive is responsible for keeping its promise across the organization. It is an operator’s definition of branding: what the company does when the campaign team has left the room.
“The bottom line is that financial institutions have to differentiate and, from my perspective, that differentiation has to come through the customer experience.”Andrew Zimakas, on innovation in banking
Orange was the visible part
In 2011, Zimakas entered the chapter for which he remains best known publicly, joining ING DIRECT Canada as its senior marketing leader. The bank had already built a challenger identity around no-fee banking, direct access and an orange visual language. The harder question arrived after Scotiabank acquired it: how do you change the name without breaking the meaning?
The transition to Tangerine was bright, public and easy to photograph. Beneath the color sat a subtler repositioning. The business wanted to grow from a place Canadians associated mainly with saving into an everyday bank. Zimakas’s team had to preserve the plain-speaking character of ING DIRECT while expanding what customers believed it could do. When he left in 2015, the company credited him with shaping the marketing vision, helping redefine that market position, and strengthening the brand through the transition. Tangerine had also made the 2014 shortlist for Marketer of the Year.
His interviews from the period resist the tidy certainty that marketing executives are sometimes paid to project. Asked about media strategy, he replied, “No sacred cows.” Television still mattered; social behavior was changing how television worked; referrals remained a substantial acquisition engine; relevance varied by segment and region. Asked how to find the right media mix, he described trial, experimentation and some science, then supplied the honest coda: “The reality is, it’s still a matter of art and science.”
The long route to one clear brief
The same period reveals a wider interest in behavior. He spoke about moving financial education beyond literacy and toward action. ING DIRECT’s “Money Movement” was intended to combine education, motivation and behavior change. In 2011 he hosted a live personal-finance panel at the bank’s Yonge Street café, with a webcast reaching café locations in Calgary, Vancouver and north Toronto. Two years later, the bank invited Canadians to make short videos about inventive ways to save. The campaign logic was participatory, but the ambition was older and more difficult: change the conversation people have with themselves.
A marketer walks into the operating room
After Tangerine, Zimakas became senior vice president of corporate strategy at LoyaltyOne. In late 2017 he took an interim operations assignment at Sprout Wellness Solutions, a workplace technology company. Five months later, after facilitating strategic planning and operational improvements, he was appointed chief executive. The promotion is a useful clue. Plenty of marketers want influence over operations. Zimakas accepted responsibility for them.
At Sprout, he described the fit in terms of a purpose-driven organization at the intersection of technology and wellness, two areas he called personal passions. In 2020 he moved to Medcan, taking product, experience and revenue responsibilities. By the time he joined Experity in 2023, his resume had stopped resembling a conventional marketing ladder. It looked more like a series of field assignments in how promises survive contact with products, sales teams, service operations and customers.
The operating test
Does the campaign describe an experience the company can actually deliver? Zimakas’s career keeps returning to that question, from a bank’s no-fee promise to the everyday mechanics of software adoption.
Experity brings those strands together. Its customers are businesses, but its software sits inside moments experienced by individuals. The CMO’s brief covers demand and communication, while the company’s wider system connects registration, scheduling, clinical workflows, payments, follow-up and analytics. Zimakas has appeared in company programming about community relationships, hyper-local marketing and long-term engagement. The phrasing is contemporary; the instincts are familiar. Pay attention to context. Make the next step easier. Treat a customer relationship as something more durable than a transaction.
The work after the work
A second career runs beside the corporate one. Zimakas served on the management board of Canadian Geographic Enterprises, on the Board of Governors of Junior Achievement of Central Ontario, and as a voting member and co-chair of the Canadian Marketing Association’s Brand and Strategic Planning Council. He has advised Centennial College’s graduate program in digital engagement strategy, lectured on branding through the University of Toronto and Schulich, and served on the board of Toronto’s Queen West Art Crawl.
In 2013, he received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for contributions to Canada connected with the Royal Canadian Geographic Society. In August 2025, another geographic commitment arrived when he was appointed an independent director of the CGLR Canada Foundation, part of the Council of the Great Lakes Region. The foundation’s field is sustainability across a vast cross-border watershed. It is an appropriately large system for someone whose professional instinct has been to find a usable human proposition inside institutional complexity.
His public comments about executive coaching offer a rare personal note. He has described the value of a listener who asked useful questions, guided his thinking and supplied practical tools, saying the effect on his leadership was immediate and lasting. The admission matters because long biographies tend to flatten development into a string of promotions. Zimakas’s account leaves room for revision. Experience accumulates; so should the willingness to be coached.
“No sacred cows.”Andrew Zimakas, on choosing media channels
That compact line may be the best coda. The career contains impressive constants, but little attachment to a single industry, title or channel. He has been a brand manager, general manager, consultant, strategist, CMO, chief executive and product leader. He has sold things from shelves and through screens, helped rename a bank, run a workplace platform, and marketed the operating system behind urgent-care practices. Each move risks making the biography look broader than the expertise. Look again and the expertise is the movement: enter a complicated system, find the promise worth keeping, and remove whatever makes it harder to feel.
Simplicity, in that reading, is no minimalist aesthetic. It is respect expressed through operations. The customer should not need the organization chart, the acquisition history or the stack diagram. They need the next action to make sense. Thirty-five years after Zimakas began at P&G, that remains a demanding brief. It also travels remarkably well.