It sounds so simple on paper: get an ad designed by a kid to appear on dad’s favourite website. But as anyone who works in the programmatic space can tell you, actually making this work (it’s called real-time IP retargeting to those in-the-know) was a huge accomplishment for Jungle Media and its partners working on IKEA’s #Sharethebathroom campaign.
Jungle has been doing great work for IKEA for a while now, earning bronze MIAs last year for its role in the “House Rules” campaign and shortlist status in Cannes this past summer for #Sharethebathroom (which, as shown elsewhere on The List, let family members recommend IKEA products to messy siblings, kids and parents in real time via websites they actually visited).
This year, that agency/client partnership won Best of Show at the MIAs, but it’s just one highlight from an otherwise remarkable year for the agency.
The Vision 7-owned media agency scored a remarkable 22 new clients this year, 16 of them with full agency-of-record status, and many coming in through the Montreal office it opened last summer (its fourth) under Danick Archambault. Yellow Pages, the Toronto International Film Festival, Little Caesars and Le Chateau joined a client roster that already included Nike, Sleeman Breweries and Capital One.
Jungle bills itself as ideal for mid-sized clients (i.e. those in the $30-million-budget-and-under range) and maintains a staff of 50, but has spent the past year buffing its already considerable data analysis operations. Its hiring of Daniel Iwasa-Madge as director of data strategy late last year was part of that effort to better position itself to clients asking for analytics.
Case in point: Capital One is one of the agency’s biggest clients, and this year challenged it to increase new customer acquisitions and improve its data reporting to help deliver better ROI.
As part of that effort, Jungle custom-built a performance tracking program for the brand that offered social, programmatic display, advanced testing and optimization, remarketing, custom segmentation, search and automated reporting tools along with attribution and a data visualization dashboard. Being able to develop, test and track consumer outreach with this new dashboard and optimize its campaigns, Capital One saw applications from new customers increase 179% over the program’s 12 months.
That sounds all very technical and businesslike, but Jungle is also capable of building buzz online with a bit of NSFW fun. Take, for example, the time they attached a penis to a bicycle seat to promote an exhibit at Montreal’s McCord Museum exploring LGBT identity. The installation, designed to be photographed and posted online, was seen by more than 290,000 people during one day at the city’s Pride celebrations. The agency says the project was responsible for 30,000 visitors to the exhibit.
