By thinking small, one of Canada’s hottest agencies got even hotter
Of the many possible reasons behind Leo Burnett Canada’s successful year, CEO and chief creative officer Judy John proposes a simple explanation: “we’re not jerks.”
It sounds amusingly simple, but John is not joking. “We really are the multinational that walks like an independent,” she says, attributing the agency’s ability to empathize with clients to their indie-shop mentality.
“Small clients are not going to get lost here, because we operate like a small agency. We’re scrappy for a big agency. We can think small.”
Thinking small produced a huge impact. The agency won prestigious awards and coveted new business with regularity, and their willingness to level with the little guy came across even in the major campaigns of premiere accounts.
For Yellow Pages, Leo Burnett emphasized a renewed focus on local economies in their “Meet the New Neighbourhood” television spots.
For IKEA, they served free coffee to sleepy people in Toronto and Vancouver to remind them of the importance of healthy sleeping patterns and promote IKEA’s new mattress line. In Montreal, they distributed IKEA-branded boxes to urbanites about to move and turned people into coupons for the opening of a new location, which more than doubled target attendance numbers.
For discount beer-brand James Ready (whose price had just gone up), Leo Burnett continued its award-worthy thinking by offering university students a free ride to the beer store and executed a strong Facebook campaign that distanced the brand from its former price-based platform – not an easy task for a beer that’s affordable cost was long its primary allure. “A lot of these buck-a-beer brands don’t have the money for giant promotions,” says John. “We can’t send people on trips, so we find really creative ways to help them have the cache of a brand, but as a discount brand.” It worked. With zero paid media, James Ready’s social media consumer engagement saw a 36% boost.
More and more, Leo Burnett Canada is earning praise for its design work. At this year’s Advertising & Design Club of Canada awards, they won a prestigious Scarlet Letter for Best Design Firm in addition to five golds, including one for their James Ready social media campaign. They’ve won at Cannes, The One Show, The Cassies and The Effie Awards, and earned 30 trophies at this year’s Marketing Awards.
“It really shows our depth as an agency,” says John, about the breadth of Leo Burnett’s awards recognition. “We do everything, but we do it with excellence.” The agency did not lose any accounts this year, and enjoyed a 7% revenue increase.
John says that strong company culture is a big factor when it comes to keeping up the momentum. “People want to come here,” she says with pride. “And the people who come here stay here. We have a lot of fun. I like coming to work.” Among those people who’ve stuck around are Leo Burnett creative gurus Lisa Greenberg and Sean Barlow, who helped Leo Burnett become agency of record for TD Canada Trust.
In 2012, the first full year with John at the helm alongside president and chief operating officer Dom Caruso, Leo Burnett won big accounts like TD, Earls and the Yellow Pages Group.
Andre LeBlanc, director of communications at Yellow Pages Media, calls the campaign a strategic success and credits Leo Burnett with not only repositioning the Yellow Pages brand, but reminding consumers that it still had functionality in a digital world. “We really had to shift perceptions in a dramatic way,” says LeBlanc.
“What Leo brought to the table was an understanding for not only the brand, but the work that needed to be done.And it was done in a very simple, straightforward and well-articulated way. They’re a really great bunch of people to work with because they’re non-assuming and transparent. It’s a very direct and open conversation. It’s an authentic relationship. We say real things to each other.”
Authenticity is important to John, who says she enjoys the competiveness of her job.
“You can’t just push out a couple ads and hope people show up. You have to create some excitement,” she says about Leo Burnett’s experientially driven work. “It’s always about taking it to the next level.”
When asked what the future holds for Leo Burnett, John answers quickly: “World domination.” This time she is joking. Or maybe not.
