As it embarks on a “pivotal” year, satellite radio company SiriusXM Canada has consolidated its direct response advertising assignment with Toronto’s Agency59 Response.
Following on the heels of their U.S. counterparts, who came together in 2008, former rivals Sirius Canada and XM Canada merged in June 2011. Agency59 had been working with XM since August 2009, while Wunderman worked with Sirius. The merged entity called a review late last year in an effort to harmonize its direct marketing.
Both Agency59 and Wunderman were invited to pitch on the business alongside one other undisclosed agency.
“It was important to us to find an agency that would be really efficient in helping us integrate all of our marketing communications from a direct response perspective,” said Danielle Brown, director of conversion and “winback” for SiriusXM.
With XM, Agency59 was responsible for converting those people who received a trial subscription to the service when purchasing or leasing a new car, as well as retaining existing subscribers. Its purview has now been expanded to include winning back customers who have let their subscription lapse, as well as new customer acquisition.
Brown said that Agency59 had been successful in “streamlining” the direct response business for XM Canada, and will be charged with achieving similar objectives for the merged SiriusXM entity, which currently boasts two million subscribers.
“We want to be able to get mail out as quickly as possible, and they were the people who showed us how we could shave time off our delivery time and shave costs,” said Brown. “It’s really about being efficient and effective and getting our message to consumers quicker, and they showed us they could do that.”
Brown said that Agency59’s use of a network of freelancers, as opposed to an in-house creative department, was also key factor in its decision. “That really helped us to work with a model that helped us keep our costs down,” said Brown. “It was a significant savings for us because we were looking at more than doubling the pieces that the XM side of the business was sending out with the Sirius side of the business.”
Agency59 president David Foy said that while both Sirius and XM currently operate as separate entities, the agency is currently harmonizing the look and feel of the creative for the two. Brown said the Sirius and XM brands will ultimately be combined into a single entity, but didn’t provide a timeline for when that would happen.
Foy said that both entities have different strengths when it comes to their direct response marketing. “XM was further ahead than Sirius on acquisition, [but] Sirius had a terrific loyalty and retention and winback program in place, and we’re going to adopt that for XM,” he said. “We’re taking the best of the best strategies the two companies were using and creating that as the initial platform.”
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