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.
Zulu Alpha Kilo
It won Coca-Cola and developed a loyalty program for Jack Astor. Zulu is all grown up.
When Zak Mroueh opened Zulu Alpha Kilo in 2008, his plan was to grow to about 15 people in three years. He wasn’t even close. Three years later, the agency is up to 45 full-timers—Mroueh likes to joke ZAK became a real agency in 2011 “because we have full-time IT and full-time HR”—and if it keeps producing the kind of work it did in the past year and winning major clients like, say, Coca-Cola, Zulu Alpha Kilo might just become one of the most important agencies in Canada.
While the agency launched with Bell as a founding client—an assignment shared with Leo Burnett in which ZAK handles about half of all English creative for the telecom giant—both Mroueh and agency president Mike Sutton point to the Coke win in late October 2010 as an important turning point for the agency.
It was the first time in Coca-Cola’s history that it consolidated all 18 of its brands with one agency, and ZAK out-pitched some of the top creative shops in the country in a tough, three month-long review.
“That was the big bang moment,” says Sutton. “With Coke, that really gave us the confidence to know that we can go up against any other shop in the country and win.”
Which is not to say they started chasing every RFP that hit the market. On the contrary. Mroueh and Sutton didn’t want to stretch themselves too thin. “We decided to not do any other pitches for about six or seven months,” says Mroueh. Though aside from full-time IT and HR, ZAK was adding other important “Zuligans”—as they’ve branded their staff—to meet client needs including Cory Pelletier, director of innovation, who defected from Taxi; Sean Ganann, creative director, who left digital shop Campfire in New York; Hilton Barbour, strategic planning director from Organic (note the digital theme here); and David Isaac, director of integrated production, who came from Red Urban.
And Bell, for one, is glad to see ZAK picking up new clients. A healthy, active agency is better for any marketer because it is seeing new things and getting new ideas, says Rick Seifeddine, Bell’s senior vice-president, brand. “[Mroueh] is a sensible business person. I don’t feel neglected in any way.” Seifeddine, who’s worked with Mroueh for years, going back to their previous gigs at Telus and Taxi respectively, is clearly a big fan: “Zak can be summed up in three words. He is smart. He is nice and is a perfectionist,” says Seifeddine. “There are a lot of smart assholes [in the industry]. To have someone who is smart and nice is so rare and wonderful.”
They managed to stick to the no-new-business plan until Sir Corp. came looking for someone to help boost the Jack Astor’s brand.
“It wasn’t a traditional pitch,” says Mroueh, who worked with Sir Corp. when he was at Taxi. “They came to us.”
“When I saw what [Mroueh has] done with his new shop, I was very impressed,” George Kakaletris, vice-president of marketing and branding at Sir Corp. told Marketing at the time.
“[ZAK] has heavied-up in some key areas we were looking at, including social media.”
The assignment was an opportunity for ZAK to prove that its strategic contributions could go way beyond making ads, including developing a new loyalty play which launched as the VVVIP program in August. “We are doing some of the creative advertising for them,” says Sutton. “But with Jack Astor’s we actually have quite a big impact on the in-store experience: coasters, store banners, onto menu covers,” says Sutton.
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