Peter Holmes has just finished renovations on his Toronto agency’s operations, transforming Holmes & Lee into Reason Partners.
The company has been in flux since the departure of partner John Lee last fall.
In December, Holmes decided to stop pursuing new business and simply maintain current accounts while examining his business model.
With the construction signs now taken down and the name changed, Holmes said the shop boasts a “cell” model that puts emphasis on three key areas: planning, technology and creative advertising.
“Holmes and Lee had a more or less flat, traditional structure. It operated on strategic creative and wasn’t too different from anyone else out there,” Holmes said. “The cells structure puts the most important disciplines together at the beginning.”
In particular, because digital technologies have evolved so rapidly in recent years, Holmes saw a need to move employees with online expertise earlier into the marketing process. “Creative should work hand-in-hand with technology and strategic planning,” he said.
Each cell is guided by a subject matter expert—Holmes’s background is in creative advertising, Simon Billing has been named director of strategic planning, and Mike Mulik, formerly the agency’s senior art director, now serves as director of art and technology.
However, Billing said the new model does not “silo” the business, a term that has come to describe an outdated structure where business units have different profit-and-loss mandates, and therefore compete for resources instead of collaborating on client work.
Reason Partners’ cells are meant to operate together under one “P and L,” said Billing.
“This is putting [experts] at the same table to solve a problem, then going out and executing. Execution serves thinking in our model, whereas thinking tends to serve execution in the traditional agency model.”
Reason Partners is currently the agency of record for ICI Paints (which owns the Glidden brand), Credit Canada, Pinecone Greeting Cards and Moonface Publishing.
