In a way, Matthew Manuge can thank Tim Hortons for his rising career in commercial and content creation.
It was the early days of YouTube and he and a group of high school friends in Bracebridge, Ont. were having fun making silly videos. “Half of them wanted to be actors and I wanted to be the guy to make the actors look good,” he says.
By working an after-school job at Tim Hortons, Manuge saved up enough to buy a $900 camcorder and a computer to edit whatever they shot. “In a summer, we ended up shooting 30 or 40 videos because that was what we were doing for fun,” he says. “We were learning and making mistakes and being goofy and being creative. I think it was at that point that I was like, ‘Oh, you know this is my career. I want to do this.’”
Today the 29-year-old is associate creative director at Blue Ant’s Media Solutions group in Toronto, leading successful creative campaigns for clients such as Canon, Axe, Samsung, Home Hardware, Bosch, Government of Canada, Ford and Taco Bell. He played a key role in the launch of Cottage Life TV, produced his own 13-part TV series called Free-Loading for Blue Ant’s Bite TV and more.
With the industry experiencing a rise in content marketing, Manuge is guided by a simple philosophy to set Blue Ant clients apart. “My biggest job is no matter what idea we have, or whether we think it’s good or answers the brief, we have to take a step back and say ‘do people really want to watch this?’”
Scott Walker, director, creative and media operations at Blue Ant, says Manuge can do a lot of things well—“he’s kind of a Swiss Army knife”—but singled out his ability to quickly and efficiently produce breakthrough stories for Blue Ant clients. “Matt is a great storyteller,” says Walker. He can take the technical requirements of the production team, add his own vision and make it a reality, he says.
“Besides the technical aspect, he’s got a really great energy,” says Walker. His tongue-in-cheek sense of humour was instrumental in Blue Ant’s Cottage Life winning a project for Paddle Canada; to deliver a water safety message, Manuge produced a quirky series of videos that mimic film and television tropes from decades ago, starting with a silent film from the ’20s.
Asked what, aside from his impressive technical abilities, might explain his success so far, Manuge suggests his willingness to be proactive, to create opportunity where none exists.
“A lot of the reason why I have opened doors is because I kind of bust through them,” he says. After missing out on a job because his graphic skills were insufficient, he downloaded a graphics program and improved his skills through YouTube tutorials. Three months later, when a similar job was posted at High Fidelity (which was later acquired by Blue Ant), he was ready.
“I kind of fibbed a little and said I’d been doing it a long time.” He got the job. Then he kept pitching ideas and TV shows until he got his own series. Same thing after he joined the media solutions team: constantly pitching ideas for clients. Unilever liked one of his concepts so much the consumer goods company used it for a rare made-in-Canada brand spot.
“It was part of a program that won a Cassie last year and it is still one of our crowning achievement types of spots that says this is what we can do on a low budget and we can make it look just as good as a high budget piece.”
There are insights and anecdotes aplenty in our 30 Under 30 editorial package. To get the scoop on our finalists visit 30U30.ca and read full profiles of Canada’s next set of marketing leaders.
