It’s time to review our finalists for 2011 Agency of the Year. To find out which of our top 10 shops takes top honours, pick up the January 2012 issue of Marketing.
It still calls Vancouver home, but in 2011 Blast Radius became a truly global agency, winning business and producing work for some of the biggest brands on the planet
Blast Radius may be the only agency in the country that can truly boast that it’s better known outside of Canada than in it.
The founders of Blast Radius have always thought big. They navigated their way through the dotcom meltdown and while other digital shops learned code, Blast was already positioned as a global internet solutions developer.
But even when the five Vancouver Film School grads were still working in a basement suite and figuring out their manifesto, they couldn’t have dreamed that 15 years later Blast would have nine offices around the world and a client list sprinkled with mega brands like Microsoft, Nokia, Electronic Arts, Michelin, Nike, BMW, Tommy Hilfiger and Danone.
The truth is Blast Radius has always been better known in New York than New West. With the exception of Lululemon, few local companies can afford them. Its target market is unapologetically $4 billion-plus companies in the consumer goods, hospitality, automotive and telco industries.
This past year has been particularly lucrative. Blast was named digital agency of record for Nike Golf and Nike Canada as well as Kodak, Nivea Canada, Novartis, Johnson & Johnson and Bacardi.
At the same time the company’s staff count rose to 450 from 390 a year ago, with the majority of staff and executive management working out of Blast’s chic four-storey brick building in Vancouver’s Yaletown. New positions, such as executive vice-president of emerging technologies, also show the growing importance of mobile, which Gurval Caer, co-founder, president and CEO estimates is now about 25% of overall business.
Blast also scooped up a slew of awards including several FWA (Favourite Website Awards), a Lovie, an OMMA Website Excellence, a Webby and was a finalist at the One Show.
Caer says while Blast has always worked with international brands, it wasn’t until this year that it really became a global agency.
“We used to drive some of these huge brands out of a centralized location, but what we are finding is that we are more successful when we start putting people around the world to work with local markets,” he says.
Caer believes Blast won the multi-language Michelin account because of the Paris office that opened earlier this year (in part to service new account Danone).
Also this year, the agency launched six major projects reaching into dozens of countries, including the Hamburg office-produced “100 Years of Skincare” campaign in more than 65 countries for Nivea, working with superstar Rihanna to bring ground-breaking augmented reality technology to the market.
Caer says Blast’s European offices now represent more than 30% of the company’s total business. Blast is now setting its sights on China. A senior team of strategists from Vancouver has spent time in the region scoping out consumer insights and social norms to prepare for a new Shanghai office opening next year.
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