Left to right: Alan Madill, Jill Nykoliation, Terry Drummond, and Barry Quinn
Everyone at Juniper Park hates their mid-town Toronto office space. Nothing about its bland carpeting or cramped rooms suggest some of the top minds in Canadian advertising work there. Offices with desks too large for their space line the perimeter, and many of the staff are squashed together in the “open area” at the office’s south end. The kitchen is small. The lighting is ungenerous. It’s humdrum, ’80s-era corporate interior design with nary a foosball table to be found. There’s barely enough wall space to post concept art.
“As you walk around you’ll see a lot of foamcore, which are basically moveable walls,” says Alan Madill, one of the agency’s three creative directors. There are two six-foot lengths of the thin white boards in his office and both are covered with Lay’s brand work. Several more boards can be seen outside the boardroom, plastered with ideas for the agency’s upcoming Virgin Mobile campaign.
Madill is much more enthusiastic about Juniper Park’s new location, currently being renovated just down the road on Bloor Street. He unrolls the floor plans of the new space across the desk he shares with Terry Drummond, his creative partner and fellow agency founder. The plans show a much more spacious, agency-like design.
“We will have some individual offices because creative teams need a bit of privacy, but we want them to be open,” he says. “So we’re taking the fronts off them. We’ll have moveable walls as well so we can move work around.”
“Like the foamcore, but more formal,” Drummond chimes in.
Scanning the plans, Madill notes the wide, L-shaped corridor labelled “Park.”
“It’s an open space that will be fun and inviting, just an interesting type of space where we’ll have staff meetings and stuff… Terry and I said we have to have an area where we can zoom around on scooters.”
“Park” is more than just a quirky moniker for the fun space. It’s how staffers abbreviate the agency’s name (as in “I work at the Park”). The four founders–Drummond, Madill, fellow CD Barry Quinn and president Jill Nykoliation–also used it as a model for their stunningly successful business.
“When you think back to being a kid, the park was where you wanted to go,” says Quinn. “At first you went alone, but you met friends and collaborated. You created new worlds. It was a place of wonder and fun, and that’s how we wanted our office to be. And we wanted our clients to want to come to a place where anything was possible. Even a short kid like me could be a warrior at the park. And you never wanted to leave. It was always ‘five more minutes mom!’ ”
So far, this approach has worked.
Juniper Park, which is part of Omnicom and reports to BBDO Worldwide in New York, has grown from six to 60 staffers in two years by landing major brand assignments with U.S. snack maker Frito Lay and making its mark in Canada with Astral Media and Virgin Mobile.
Clients, of which there are currently nine, rave about how the agency “actually” provides strategy and “actually” understands their business. Juniper Park has been sought out by women’s shaving-product maker Eos and Oakville Place shopping centre after senior execs saw its work in-market. There’s clearly something different going on in this cramped, dull office.
For those clients less familiar with the work, all it takes is a single pitch meeting to see something’s different. That’s what happened during Virgin Mobile’s recent agency review.
“You know when you do your little ranking before you actually meet anybody? I thought, ‘Well, I’ll meet them anyway and it will be fun to know who they are,’ ” says Nathan Rosenberg, chief marketing officer for Virgin Mobile. He and Andrew Bridge, director of brand communication, took turns singing Juniper Park’s praises on a patio near Virgin’s office in downtown Toronto. “Very quickly, in the first meeting, they demonstrated an excitement about our brand. They gave us a read-back on what they thought we were like, what we had and hadn’t done. It was incredibly insightful.”
“They said, quite rightly, we had a unique licence to do things in the market that others didn’t,” says Bridge. “They challenged our courage and whether we’d done what we could to be true to the Virgin brand. We appreciated that candor.”
Looking back on the review, Rosenberg remembers Juniper Park’s competitors presenting their agency’s processes for reaching “insight ideas.” In comparison, Juniper Park talked about Virgin, asked questions along the way, and when it won the account it had a few insights already in hand.
“All the questions [Juniper Park] asked were very smart and well thought-out,” says Bridge. “We didn’t see that universally.”
“Juniper came in and just talked,” Rosenberg continues, his eyes bright. “It was so refreshing to have an honest dialogue with somebody. They weren’t afraid to tell us what they thought about us and what we could achieve working together… Now I’m really excited. I haven’t felt this way in five years.”
So what goes on inside Juniper’s walls that gets them to customer insights so quickly? Primarily, it’s an understanding that strategy, insight and collaboration are more than sell lines on the agency website.
“Their collaboration starts well upstream, where they come in to understand not just the creative brief, but our total business,” says Gannon Jones, vice-president, marketing at Frito Lay North America and the agency’s first client. “It automatically gives them a different perspective versus most agencies. Then their creative process is iterative. They don’t lock themselves away for six weeks and then pop up with ‘the’ answer, but rather recognize that collaborating with us at key points invariably leads to a better, stronger solution. Internally, their creative teams view strategy and account as equal partners, which in my experience is unique.”
Drummond puts it another way: Juniper Park is not staffed with advertisers, but problem solvers. That includes creatives, account folks, and even media planners. Juniper is so keen to have media involved in the early stages of campaign work it’s given one of its offices to Scott Marsden, the director of strategy at OMD New York who partners with the agency on its Frito Lay business. He’s in Toronto a couple of days each week.
“We all get around a table, teams of anywhere up to 12 people, and just attack a problem,” says Drummond. “In other agencies I’ve been part of, that’s been left to an individual, a planner. They do their part of the process and then it gets sent down the hall. Here, everyone comes in at the beginning, talks, shouts, laughs and cries all at once. It makes what the planners are doing richer, and puts artists and designers on the same page.”
According to the agency founders, everyone at Juniper is part strategist and part creative, regardless of formal title. Work at all stages is posted on those foamcore panels so passersby can comment and refine ideas, an informal practice that Drummond says works far better than a proprietary, step-by-step process.
“It’s hard to criticize someone’s point of view when it’s in a formal question: ‘What do you think?’” he says. “When it’s on the walls, people walk by and go ‘Hey, that’s interesting. Y’know what would be cool..?’ It’s more organic.”
This has occasionally led to debates that sound more like arguments than business meetings, but Quinn has been known to emerge smiling from heated sessions saying “That was great!” As a designer, he loves the approach for its constant refinement of base ideas, and is backed fully by the agency’s president, Jill Nykoliation, one of Canada’s smartest strategists who has just been named one of Ad Age’s Women to Watch in 2009.
“She has a style where she can call you on your shit without being offensive,” says Virgin’s Bridge.
“She is truly brilliant,” says Sanjiv Mehra, a founding partner at Eos. “We were utterly blown away.”
Nykoliation’s rise began at Kraft Canada, where she worked with Frito Lay’s Jones between 1999 and 2004 before leaving for Toronto agency Grip Ltd. At Kraft she and Jones managed the company’s national customer relationship management program–a rather unglamorous beginning to a breakout agency career, but Jones believes that experience is what makes Nykoliation such an effective strategist.
“That program was about understanding the consumer very deeply, not the brand,” says Jones, who is now based in Texas. “And that taught a discipline about going deeper on consumer understanding than, frankly, a lot of marketers who’ve only worked on individual brands do. Brand managers typically see consumers through a myopic brand lens. CRM forced her to look more holistically at the consumer than most.”
Nykoliation says working on customer relations for a packaged goods company completely changed how she views the industry. Seated in her office, the biggest of the boring boxes in Juniper Park’s space, she remembers how little research there was to steer her work at Kraft.
“CRM for a car is easy,” she says. “People spend $40,000 on a car and put a lot of thought into it, so they’re okay with having a relationship with a brand. Spending a dollar on something in a jar? That’s not much to go on. Do you want a relationship with your gum? No. But we solved it with a team of white-space thinkers, which is what we have [at Juniper Park].
“We consume case studies, deconstruct things, figure out what principles from other work apply to what we’re doing, and we work with clients to teach each other. You don’t just bring them a campaign, you help them understand how the program works. Put the creative aside, look at the goal, the experience, the competition.”
However, this approach, so loved by those who’ve come to play in the Park, is also an obstacle. Nykoliation says she’s encountered resistance from those who either aren’t expecting, or don’t want such a deep level of involvement with an agency. Marketing VPs who want agencies on-plan and delivering pre-determined increases on last year’s results might flinch at the Juniper Park way of doing things.
“We’re going to ask questions and drive you crazy,” Nykoliation says. “We know what we’re good at and what we like.”
To illustrate this to clients and prospective employees, she loves to use a metaphor of paved roads and tall grass.
“The paved road is lined with filing cabinets filled with last year’s plan and processes and you’ve got to beat last year’s plan. Lots of agencies can do that and many clients want that. But we’re tall grass… you get your machete out and figure problems out. You might poke your head up every once in a while and see you’re not where you thought, but you go back down and get back at it.”
Don’t be surprised if the next time Juniper Park pokes its head back up, it has a few more big-name clients. It’s currently meeting with new prospective partners that, if renovations proceed on schedule, will come to race scooters with Madill and Drummond in August when the new office opens.
Of course, if business grows at the rate it has in the Park’s two short years of existence, maybe they’d better start looking for another new office now, just to be safe.
