L’Oreal Canada is the first marketer signed on to the AAPQ’s experimental YUL-Lab, a cooperative effort by Montreal’s agencies to position the city as the ideal location to develop and test international marketing strategies.
The agreement was announced at an event in Montreal Tuesday night, where the new YUL-Lab moniker–YUL being the three-letter airport code for Montreal–was unveiled.
Long in the works, YUL-Lab sees many of Montreal’s agencies working together to attract American and other marketers to Montreal. Their pitch? According to Sébastien Fauré, the association’s chairman and president of Montreal agency BleuBlancRouge, Montreal is an ideal testing ground for marketers because its different cultural influences have produced advertising styles that would be considered groundbreaking in other markets.
And aside from the city’s multilingual, mutli-ethnic population, Montreal agencies also have the technical and new media expertise to help companies understand emerging platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
“We truly believe Montreal could be the innovation centre of global brand teams in the world,” said Fauré.
“Consumers are in control so, basically, we need to learn how to talk to those consumers in the way they want now.”
Montreal is the perfect place to figure that out, he argues, because it has a large talent pool that mixes a “Latin spirit with American business sense.”
By selling Montreal as a global hot-spot of advertising experimentation and innovation, its agencies should eventually attract major new international clients.
The AAPQ also confirmed Tuesday night it would embark on a series of trade missions to cities within a two-hour flight of Montreal to sell new clients on YUL-Lab.
The first, to Chicago Nov. 19 and 20, will be headed by Daniel Lamarre, CEO of Cirque du Soleil. New York and Philadephia will also be visited.
“L’Oréal often proves to be part of the avant-garde in promoting its products,” said L’Oreal director of communications Anik Gagnon. “It was thus tempting for us to test these kinds of initiatives within a restricted market before launching them across Canada.”
She declined to name the product nor the type of campaign YUL-Lab is working on and said YUL-Lab will be more valuable in terms of testing the mechanics of a campaign rather than in development of new creative.
“For a multinational company like ours, creative initiatives are similar throughout and function well in the majority of markets,” she said. “But the media are evolving very quickly, especially the web, and we want to test a new approach before investing considerable sums into it.”
Another advantage is Yul-Lab could help the subsidiaries of multinational companies based in Montreal to become leaders in creative media and marketing innovations, said Gagnon. “It is certain that, if an initiative works, we’ll make it known to the head office,” she said. “Therefore, it’s not only good for the agencies from here, but likewise for the regional divisions of multinational companies.”
Would L’Oréal be able to test its campaigns here without the creation of YUL-Lab? “Probably, but the AAPQ is offering us a unique point of access which makes that task much easier,” said Gagnon.
Furthermore, L’Oréal will benefit from preferential rates agreed to by the large media groups within the YUL-Lab framework.
“And we likewise benefit from the research firms which the AAPQ places at our disposal in order to obtain the best data on the results of our campaign.”
This article originally appeared in au quotidien, Marketing’s French daily e-newsletter
