One of Canada’s largest agencies was also one of its best thanks to digital expertise and dozens of account wins
McDonald’s massive “Our Food. Your Questions.” campaign started as a client request for a QR code. The company wanted Tribal DDB to create codes that would lead to a series of FAQs on McDonald’s food quality. It was a project worth about $50,000.
McDonald’s wanted to improve the perception of its food, but Tribal DDB Toronto managing director Andrew McCartney knew that would take more than a single project. Instead, he suggested a full-fledged digital brand campaign.
The result was one of the most talked about campaigns of the year. Since June, the campaign’s section of McDonald’s site has clocked over one million hits. Its YouTube videos have been seen 13 million times. And when the brand decided to launch an above-the-line campaign based on the initiative in September, it asked Tribal DDB to create it instead of its traditional agency, Cossette.
DDB is growing and a lot of that is thanks to Tribal. DDB Canada’s digital initiatives, led by Tribal, now account for a third of the agency’s business, according to president and COO David Leonard. He estimates Tribal DDB’s revenue grew by 66% this year through work for clients like Manulife, Canadian Tire and Korres, a Johnson & Johnson beauty brand the agency helped launch in Canada this year almost exclusively through PR and social media.
However, Tribal wasn’t the only success story in the agency’s network this year. DDB won more than 35 new clients including AutoTrader, Lipton, EventBrite, Milk West Partnership and Dairy Farmers of Canada.
It also beat out 30 agencies in a review for incumbent client Canadian Tourism Commission (CTC), which Leonard says was the agency’s biggest win of the year. Greg Klassen, CTC’s senior vice-president of marketing, says it was DDB’s strategic approach to the CTC’s communications that won them the account.
“They’re not like other agencies who come in with clever creative, though that’s important,” Klassen says. “They really understand the strategy of the customer. The points of opportunity and the points of challenge and figuring out how communications, regardless of channel or media, can be optimized to help achieve objectives.”
This year DDB helped Subaru sell its entire fleet of BRZs through a social media campaign that included a lentincular newspaper cover and banner ads that exploded websites into virtual flames, delivering 800 million impressions. It also created an outdoor art installation for BC Hydro that lit up only when pedestrians passed it (inspiring people to use less power). And DDB’s pro bono campaign for Big Sisters of BC Lower Mainland, which used super short TV spots to communicate the short time commitment of being a Big Sister, was one of several DDB campaigns to clean up on the 2012 awards circuit, taking home a gold at the Marketing Awards, an Applied Arts Interactive Award, a Lotus Award and more gold at the recent ADCC awards.
For AutoTrader, DDB created a Facebook app that selected the perfect car for a user based on their profile data. It also created a series of TV spots to drive traffic to AutoTrader’s website, resulting in over 3.5 million visits and a 169% increase in private listings.
Perhaps DDB’s most daring move this year was in Quebec. It had a presence in Montreal through a partnership with Zip, but the agency made a major play to plant a much bigger flag in Quebec by establishing DDB Canada Montreal through a non-equity alliance with BleuBlancRouge. The move will enable DDB to go after new business in Quebec, including government business that Leonard says his company would otherwise be unable to win.
“DDB’s Montreal office opening was a big maneuver for us this year,” Leonard says. “It’s no secret we’ve been in pursuit of a real partner. We’ve worked with BleuBlancRouge for many years on different clients and finally said, ‘Look we need to commit to one another and formalize this strategic alliance, which I’m sure one day will go beyond an alliance.’”
