Of all the brands that Montreal agency Sid Lee represented this year, perhaps none enjoyed more success than Sid Lee itself. The shop has spent the past several years developing and promoting its highly artistic, multi-media approach to consumer communication, and this mindset—which the agency trademarked as Commercial Creativity—allowed Sid Lee to achieve its goal of becoming a truly global agency in 2008.
“What happened this year is that we got results,” says François Lacoursière, vice-president and senior partner at Sid Lee. “We had clients that we created space for—mainly Adidas, SAQ [Quebec’s liquor board] and StyleSense [a shoe retailer owned by Winners], and these projects were built from scratch—building the experience and then bringing in all the other touchpoints to build the brand.”
Indeed, many clients have been so impressed with Sid Lee’s inside-out approach to communication that they have awarded the shop agency-of-record status following solid work on individual projects. Most notably, Sid Lee won the Adidas Originals clothing account this year, after its work on a co-branding campaign that partnered Adidas Originals with Diesel Jeans, an initiative that included traditional advertising, social media and in-store components.
Since winning the Originals business, the agency has redesigned stores in Berlin and New York—a workshop-flavoured design that is currently being rolled out across the world—and developed a massive advertising campaign to launch in the U.S. later this year and run globally throughout 2009 for Adidas’ 60th anniversary.
Nicole Vollebregt, vice-president, global brand marketing for Adidas Sport Style, says Sid Lee presented a winning contrast to other agencies.
“Most agencies tend to start with the 60-second spot, and everything else is a derivative,” she says. “That’s not the way Sid Lee did it. With them, you could have started at any point in the circle, whether it was public relations or retail or digital or mobile.”
Along with Adidas, Sid Lee also upgraded its relationship with SAQ, moving from strictly in-store work to interactive and offline activation, and the agency produced more solid work for existing clients such as Tourisme Montréal, redesigning its website and creating advertising campaigns for Canadian, American and European markets.
Carmen Ciotola, vice-president, marketing and communications for Tourisme Montréal, marvels at how Sid Lee has made its ideas portable. “To be able to transport the product to different platforms is really important right now—in every industry, but especially the travel industry.”
Travelling, in fact, seems to be in Sid Lee’s blood these days. Spurred by the Adidas win—as well as business pickups such as Omniyat Properties in Dubai—the agency has opened an office in Amsterdam. In addition to allowing Sid Lee to serve clients in time zones across the Atlantic, the 15-person office will serve as a hub to attract global talent.
“We’ve been investing a lot in the profile of Sid Lee as the place that you want to work if you’re under 25 and you’re creative,” says agency chair Bertrand Cesvet, whose book about the Sid Lee philosophy, Conversational Capital, was published this year and will no doubt serve as a calling card to clients and young creatives.
Even before it had a European shingle and a book deal, Sid Lee was already growing at a dizzying rate. The firm has added almost 100 new employees since August 2007, and a combination of new business and organic growth led to a 40% increase in revenues between the 2006 and 2007 fiscal years.
It hasn’t always been easy to manage this fast pace of change, says Lacoursière, but he believes Sid Lee’s growth in the past year has left it well positioned for the future.
“It’s been chaotic, but there’s been love in the air and we’ve learned a lot very quickly.”
