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.
PHD/Touché PHD
It helped get the Conservatives a majority, won new clients and plenty of awards. Its secret? Be pushy.
“If you don’t stay ahead of this thing, you’re going to get left behind.” Fred Forster, president and CEO of PHD Canada, is talking about the moving target that is the modern media world, explaining why he’d like his agency to stay at the front of the pack when it comes to anticipating trends, working creatively and garnering bottom-line results.
He needn’t worry – at least for this year. By any standard, PHD was a dominant force in Canadian media in the past 12 months, producing innovative campaigns, racking up a long list of client wins and awards and even helping to shape the country’s political future.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper would certainly cast his vote for PHD as the year’s top media agency. When his Conservative Party of Canada embarked on its 2011 election campaign, it charged PHD with handling media. In politics, only one metric really matters, and PHD delivered by helping the Conservatives get their long-coveted majority government.
Dan Robertson, executive director for the Conservative Party, says that PHD impressed with its ability to handle the fast-paced campaign.
“There’s a fluidity to political campaigns which requires a great deal of flexibility within a relatively short campaign period,” says Robertson. “In addition to effectively structuring our buy to reach our key audiences, PHD’s willingness to put senior professionals on our file and be responsive to the frequent need to adapt to changing circumstances set them apart from agencies with which I’ve worked in the past.”
When it wasn’t helping to push a majority government into power, PHD Canada and its Montreal arm Touché PHD were busy pushing the creative limits of more traditional clients. PHD’s work for Scotiabank, for example, included a live streaming event on the bank’s Facebook page, where consumers could log in and watch spokesperson and broadcaster Valerie Pringle discuss retirement saving. The event was promoted in a variety of traditional and online media, including display ads that took consumers directly to the live stream when clicked on the day of the event.
The initiative generated more than 32,000 unique views and resulted in 10,000 likes on Scotiabank’s Facebook page—which previously had only 300 fans.
“I think the Facebook live-streaming event was unique in the financial services category,” says Forster. “It was a way to really break through and allow the bank to talk directly to customers and engage them in a different way.”
In Quebec, meanwhile, Touché PHD was applying the same creative approach to its clients, including the Quebec Milk Marketing Board. The 2010 “Natural Source of Comfort” campaign that included toque-topped bus shelters continued to garner awards show praise in 2011, including a shortlist in the Festival of Media Awards in May and a Grand Prix at the 2011 InfoPresse Awards. The agency also won two Golds at the 2011 Media Innovation Awards: one for Canac and the other for Hydro-Québec, as well as a Silver and two Bronze.
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