It’s not a huge surprise that Montreal’s Sid Lee–the creative hot shop with offices in Amsterdam and Paris–is opening its fourth atelier in Toronto later this month. Its partners have been talking about such a move for years, and wryly hinted they were interested in Toronto-based business last year by registering and then advertising a phone number with a 416 area code (which redirected callers to the Montreal office). But while somewhat expected, the move will also have people asking two very different questions: Why bother with Toronto at all? What took them so long?
Let’s start with the first question. Sid Lee certainly didn’t need Toronto to win international acclaim and grow to 300 staff. Account wins in Europe made Amsterdam a much more sensible expansion, serving as both a talent magnet and central hub for account work. But despite being able to land some good-sized clients like, ohhhh….
Adidas! the majority of Canada’s largest marketers remained in Toronto, rarely looking beyond agencies close to home. “We find it interesting that we’re based in Montreal and getting calls from Asia, Europe, the U.S. and South America. And yet I can’t remember the last time we got a call from Toronto,” said J.F. Bouchard, agency president, back in 2008.
Vito Piazza believes that situation persists. Set to become the managing director of Sid Lee Toronto, Piazza well-knows how cloistered Toronto clients are compared to other markets.
“I’ve been fortunate to work in Boston, and if you’re a client in Boston and the best agency is in New York, you just take [the New York agency],” Piazza says.
Part of the problem stems from the common belief that to market inside Quebec, clients needed to hire a separate Quebec-based agency that understood the culture. Over time, this created a stigma that clients only called on Quebec shops for work inside the province. That’s fine if you want the French-language page of a national brand’s mandate.
But what if you want the whole mandate?
Sid Lee does have some Toronto-based clients (Red Bull Canada, Winners and Kraft) that will now be serviced from the new office along with a “healthy number” of newer accounts that remained unnamed at press time–relationships made possible by the regional office. But why now and not before? To Piazza, it was a matter of holding to a major tenet of Sid Lee’s culture.
“Our goal is to do international work but have local relevancy. It makes a lot more sense to tell that story [after] we opened in Amsterdam and Paris before Toronto, versus the expected transition of Quebec to Ontario.”
