When a U.S. advertising veteran and an expat Canadian who spent most of his advertising career south of the border invest their money in a Calgary agency, it causes some ripples in the local ad community. Why Calgary instead of Toronto or Vancouver, some asked when Thelton McMillian and Darren Murata opened Comrade Inc. in Calgary last June.
McMillian’s response is: Why not Calgary? “We looked at several potential sites, some in the U.S., but Calgary has the key ingredients we felt we needed to operate a successful marketing agency: a strong talent base, a growth-oriented hot economy and good quality of life.”
It helped, too, that McMillian, a Floridian, is married to a Calgarian and spent two years as COO and president of local digital agency Critical Mass. As for Murata, an Ottawa native who left his job as a senior creative with AKWA in San Francisco where he did online work for clients like Nike, Visa and Xbox, it was something of a homecoming.
They opened Comrade’s doors June 1, describing it not as an advertising agency but as a marketing agency that would offer a spectrum of services, including online and traditional advertising and marketing strategy. Says Murata, “We want to go back to what some earlier agencies did before everybody became more siloed and specialized.” By the end of 2006, Comrade’s staff had growth to five and the agency had moved into spacious new offices capable of accommodating up to 45 people.
Thanks to the partners’ contacts in the U.S., Comrade’s client lists now includes California companies Simple Floors, an importer and distributor of specialty flooring and podcaster BIG Sessions. Comrade is also launching a five-language global website this year for the U.S. arm of French computer game developer Ubisoft.
But it is the work the agency did last fall for its first homegrown client, Internet phone company Shift Networks of Calgary, that really put it on the map, by irritating Shift’s rival Telus so much that the larger telco threatened legal action. The low budget, radio and outdoor “We Need to Talk” campaign was a play on the breakup of a relationship with signs that read: “Dear Telus: It’s not you, it’s me. No wait…it is you,” and “Dear Telus: I’ve grown up, you’ve just grown.” To avoid legal action, Shift changed the billboards to read “Dear Big Telco,” but the controversy provided valuable publicity for both Shift and its Comrade.
Steve Williams, vice-president of Calgary’s Venture Communications and a veteran of the local advertising scene, admits he was unaware of Comrade at first, but definitely took notice of the Shift campaign, which he describes as “cheeky and refreshingly aggressive.” As for locating in Calgary, Williams says there’s “absolutely” enough business locally for another agency. “Don’t just take my word for it. Look at Taxi, it’s moving to make itself more than just a service office for WestJet.”
Although online work makes up the bulk of Comrade’s current business, the partners’ ideal client relationship is the one they have with Shift. “We sat down with them and discussed what marketing channels we should use, what marketing services they needed and consulted on their overall marketing strategy. We want to act as their comrade, their partner in arms,” says McMillian. Daniel Gibbons, Shift’s VP of marketing communications, says his company treats Comrade “as much as an outsourced marketing department as our agency. This isn’t an arm’s-length relationship.”
Comrade’s target client group is small to medium businesses like Shift that are in the beginning stages of their growth cycle. And McMillian isn’t content to sit and respond to requests for proposal. He plans to pitch potential clients, not only in Alberta and Canada, but in the U.S. and further afield. He and Murata also have ambitious expansion plans. “We want to open offices in either/or San Francisco and London, U.K. in 2007,” says McMillian.
