Peter Coish, founder of online publishing company XY Media Ventures and digital agency CloudAdAgents, has officially opened Kuration, a content marketing agency staffed almost exclusively by actors, directors, writers and visual artists.
According to Coish, Kuration aims to find the intersection between a brand’s values and the interests of its target audience – what the agency calls the “C-Spot.”
The Toronto-based office will house seven full-time employees, with others contributing on a project-by-project basis. Coish, who is in charge of strategy, said he’s the only employee with ad industry experience at the new shop – a decision motivated by the desire to come at content marketing from a completely different angle.
“My first agency was actually a direct marketing agency and I learned a discipline there that was all about making the sale,” said Coish. “And what I’ve come to realize is content marketing is on the other side of the planet when it comes to what it needs to achieve.
“If you use content marketing to sell, people tune out. If you use traditional creative teams, they’ve been trained to make the sale. I find that people from the entertainment industry are first and foremost about entertaining and engaging people; getting their attention and making them happy. I find they bring that kind of ethic to content creation.”
Coish recently shuttered CloudAdAgents, which he launched in 2009. The agency’s clients (including RBC, Primus Telecommunications and Explorer’s Edge) have moved over to the new shop.
“What I was doing, and the business I was in, no longer interested me,” he said. “I just found this whole other discipline so much more interesting. There’s so much to learn. Because of the rise of social and mobile content, I see an opportunity to do it differently and better. That is our mission, that’s what we’re committed to doing, and I hope that we actually prove that to people.”
Coish has also brought his three online lifestyle publications – Crew Magazine, Daily XY, and Mrs. Robinson– under the Kuration umbrella, and is launching a fourth.
On Content Marketing, to be housed at Kuration.com, will consist of a mix of original and curated stories about content marketing, and will be updated three to five times per week.
Kuration has several video projects currently in production, and the next order of business will be finding “great new clients to work with,” said Coish.
