Mark Anthony, Sandbox co-founder
John Hilbrich, Sandbox co-founder
Independent Toronto shop One Advertising has merged with three American agencies to form a new North American firm named Sandbox.
The new full-service agency has 337 employees, offices in eight cities in the U.S. and Canada, and offers a broad range of specialties including agriculture advertising, health and pharmaceutical, eCRM and digital media buying.
Sandbox’s founding quartet is made up of One Advertising, Kansas City-based McCormick Company, New York eCRM firm Underline Communications, and Chicago-based GA Communications. The agency will be held in common ownership by the four founding agencies, and their leadership will join the Sandbox executive team.
The agency will be co-led by John Hilbrich and Mark Anthony, who organized the merger. Anthony co-founded One Advertising in 2012, through the merger of two Canadian agencies, 58Ninety and Due North Communications.
Anthony said in a release that he and Hilbrich “spent substantial time getting to know each agency to ensure alignment with our collaborative philosophy first and foremost.”
“Sandbox agencies now have the breadth and depth of knowledge of the entire agency,” he said. “It creates great opportunity for clients, our people and prospective new Sandbox agencies as we expand.”
Hilbrich and Anthony worked together previously, having co-founded a Chicago design agency, Brandimage, in 2009, again from the merger of two smaller agencies. They went on to sell Brandimage to a global prepress firm, Shawck, in 2011.
Ted Boyd, CEO of the former One Advertising, clarified that Sandbox is not an agency holding company, but operates as a single brand across markets.
“This is not a holdco model at all. This is one brand, continentally placed,” he said. “Collaboration around one brand is just so much more logical than the way the holding company model has evolved over the last 20 years.”
At the heart of the philosophy behind Sandbox is the idea that to properly serve a brand, agencies need to be able to actually cooperate with one another. Boyd said the union was formed in part to answer a gnawing problem with the industry today: agencies are too busy competing for a shrinking pie to actually work together to the client’s benefit.
That’s where the name comes from, he said — the idea that agencies need to be able to “play together in the sandbox.”
One president Jill King said by joining the group the agency will gain the creative and media resources of a larger agency, but retain a level of independence it wouldn’t have if it had been bought by one of the major holdcos. “We are giving up a little bit of our independence in the sense that we’ve agreed to this collaboration, but it’s still done in that entrepreneurial spirit. So we think we’re getting our cake and eating it too.”
Though One will now be working with clients of its partners in the U.S., it intends to keep its focus on the Canadian market, both in terms of existing clients and future prospecting. For One, gaining a foothold in the U.S. is more about improving the service it can offer its Canadian and multinational clients.
“To the extent that we can provide value to other offices in the group, we will absolutely do that,” said Boyd. “But I think it’s really important in these situations to remain loyal to those we’ve worked with. Our clients will really see the benefits of that, I think.”
