Mike Sharma, formerly vice-president and general manager of Cossette’s Fjord Interactive agency, has begun a Society of his own.
Society, Sharma’s new digital-first company, positions itself part-consultancy and part-agency ready to help brands across multiple digital platforms, from social media to mobile.
“I’ve worked with some of the best agencies like Ogilvy, Cossette and Zig,” Sharma told Marketing. “I learned a lot from them, but I felt that there’s a need in the market for digital specialty. Rather than align myself to another agency, I wanted to start something on my own.”
Sharma’s departure from Fjord was announced the day after Cossette confirmed its corporate restructuring as a more integrated agency. Fjord’s operations were bundled into the overall Cossette offering (which was in turn put under a new umbrella company called Vision7), a process that Sharma helped shape.
While Sharma believed the restructuring was “absolutely right” for Cossette, he did not see a place for himself in the reformatted company.
“Brett Marchand [Cossette president and CEO] offered me some fantastic opportunities moving forward… but the opportunities presented by Vision7 wouldn’t give me enough to keep my appetite for all things digital… I was brought in to oversee all things digital for Cossette. [Under Vision7] I was going to have to choose what division I went into and no one division would have that broad purview.”
Though Sharma is currently the only Society employee, he has already landed a social media strategy assignment from an unnamed Canadian bank. He said getting the assignment was not the result of a pre-existing relationship.
There has been a trend in the industry for start-ups to employ minimal full-time staff and rely heavily on freelance help. (Zulu Alpha Kilo, Cream and Wild Mouse all adopted such a model.) However, Sharma said he wants to go “a little bit more traditional” with full-time employees.
“At the end of the day you really want to develop intellectual capital and expertise. You have to have some in-house staff to train and mentor, because if I’m going to differentiate myself, I need to make sure I have differentiated resources.”
Sharma hopes to have 10 staff by the end of 2011.
“The goal is to grow organically to suit client need, whether it’s creative or production, but deeply rooted in strategy,” he said.
Society shares an office with Open, the independent Toronto agency unveiled by Martin Beauvais and Christian Mathieu (both formerly of Zig) in October. While the companies are owned and run independently, they will offer their services to each other’s clients, thought not exclusively.
“They’ve created a very unique model for their agency,” Sharma said of Open, “which creates a wonderfully symbiotic relationship between our two companies.”
