Brett Channer is back in business with a new agency, Mass Minority, starting to roll out work for a handful of clients.
“I’m finally doing what I should have done 15 freaking years ago,” he said of the decision to launch his own shop. After a long career at Saatchi that saw him eventually named CEO of Saatchi Canada, almost 2.5 years running Publicis’s Red Lion and a short stay at Jackman, Channer bought Toronto-based digital production shop Lollipop last spring.
“I had an opportunity to acquire them and convert them into my dream company,” he said. That means fusing the digital production roots of Lollipop and a deep understanding of consumer data, with a passion for storytelling, particularly through film. “Our whole reason for existing is that technology without a story behind it is useless,” he said.
After a “soft launch” in May it started working with clients over the summer. The shop just produced three ads for Urban Beard and they’re working on Mother Parkers Tea and Coffee and just won Stone Mill Bread.
There is a full time team that includes digital developers/designers, creatives, a data scientest and film director/editors while also drawing from a 140-strong pool of what it is calling “preppy bikers”—freelancers with expertise in everything from media strategy, to PR, to CRM, YouTube “stars” and algorithm distribution. Taking lead on the accounts side will be Christine McArthur, who worked with Channer at Red Lion..
One of the fundamental differences of modern marketing is the power of personal advocacy that has exploded thanks to the social web, said Channer. “This behaviour of advocacy has to be captured into the ecosystems of selling brand or you are going to lose.”
“Amplifying the few to influence the many” is a tagline for the agency.
But in that modern context, brands and their agency partners must also be brave enough to think of the content they produce and send out into that ecosystem as completely disposable. Once you publish something, you track the reaction, learn from it, make something new based on those lessons and put it back out into the market.
Here too, said Channer, Mass Minority will differentiate itself from the competition.
The average cost for a TV spot coming out of most ad agencies today is still between $175,000 and $225,000, he said. The agency gives it to the client and the client is expected to run it for months or even a year. “The world no longer works that way,” he said.
Channer expects Mass Minority will be able to produce its film content (like the Urban Beard creative) for about half the cost of film work coming out of traditional agencies.
“A major part of it is having it all in house. You cut out all the redundancies of two producers two operating costs, etc.,” he said. They’re also using smaller crews and cheaper, but still high-quality equipment like Canon cameras and back-end finishing suites such as Apple Final Cut.
“We really do believe in the power of film and television,” he said. “But, if you are not embracing film in the way that films need to be used online than you are missing a huge opportunity.”
