Wind Mobile has hired a new agency and that agency has a new name.
The wireless telecom brand, which was purchased by Shaw in 2015, has tapped Isaac Reputation Group—the agency formerly known as Unitas—as its main agency partner.
“As Wind Mobile readies itself for the next stage of its plan the time was right for us to get some more of the right people in place,” said Alek Krstajic, president and CEO, Wind Mobile, in a release.
Asked to describe the mandate for Wind, Isaac president Mike Robitaille said the relationship would include advertising, but also go well beyond that. “We are working on all the things you would imagine and many things people wouldn’t imagine we’d be working on,” he said. “It really is applying creative thinking well beyond the scope of marketing alone.”
Robitaille said he believed Krstajic chose Isaac because of a shared philosophy about the changing nature of business and competition, which requires a different approach to building brands.
“Isaac is built for a different [business] leader, a next era leader that understands the broader definition of competitiveness that is upon us,” said Robitaille. “Alek has a personal philosophy that people buy from companies that they like and trust and the follow up question is how do you become a company that people like and trust,” said Robitaille. “That is the premise for Isaac.”
For a brand to really succeed and grow today it needs many different kinds of people supporting it. Customers are of course important, but so are employees and vendors and even regulatory bodies. “All those people can look at that company and think I like what they stand for, I’d like to see them win,” said Robitaille. With that perspective, a creative agency can contribute by working on everything from CEO speeches to employee orientation, he said.
Wind has been officially working with Isaac since April 1, but the roots of the relationship go back much further than that. Krstajic has a long history with the agency’s leadership trio of Robitaille, Bob Goulart and Dave Hamilton, going back to their time together at Grip, when Krstajic was their client at Bell.
Later, as the CEO of Public Mobile, Krstajic again turned to Robitaille and the just-launched Unitas to market the upstart wireless brand in 2009. Public was one of three new wireless brands that entered the Canadian market at about the same time as Wind. Public was sold to Telus in 2013 and Krstajic took over at Wind in March 2015.
As for the new agency name, something that has been in the works since Goulart and Hamilton left Grip to rejoin Robitaille earlier this spring, Robitaille said the inspiration came from Sir Isaac Newton, one of the great thinkers of all time who was fascinated by the unseen forces that make objects move.
“We have applied that same curiosity to a different field. Businesses that harness the unseen forces that move people, are the ones investors want to put money into, customers love and employees want to work for,” he said. “When you have those unseen forces working as wind in your sails that is the greatest competitive advantage that any company can have.”
