N/A is on a mission to make the world a better place by using creative communications to highlight brands’ socially sustainable practices. Companies with a conscience don’t often make profitability or growth their top concerns, but this five-year-old agency has shown it can achieve both.
After working with social justice organizations to drive interest in Paramount’s Martin Luther King film Selma late in 2014, Montreal’s N/A gained prominence in Canada with its “Welcome to McDonald’s” campaign back in March.
The documentary-style TV ads and online videos (which focused on the restaurant’s relationship with its neighbourhoods and customers) turned heads at the client’s head office in Chicago.
Now N/A is working both on McDonald’s charitable arm, Ronald McDonald House, and developing global content about the restaurant’s sustainable-beef programs.
As clients of all sizes have come to realize the value of content in the marketing mix, N/A has been able to attract clients as large as the United Nations and more regional brands such as Montreal tea-maker Rise. (It also just recently began working with a Fortune Global 500 electronics brand that, as of press time, it couldn’t name.)
What began as a nimble little shop is now a 20-person operation with an office in New York that’s capable of drawing top-level talent from the industry (it lured Charity Water’s Rod Arnold to be COO and Sid Lee’s Marissa De Miguel as director of strategy). Financially, the company has been stable throughout its brief history, but at the end of its most recent fiscal year, revenues were up 328%. When it looks back at 2015, this will be likely be remembered as its springboard year.
