Anomaly Toronto, which only opened its doors in April and has yet to hire a creative director, was awarded the Mini Canada business after a formal review process that got underway as the agency was getting ready to launch.
Franke Rodriguez, who moved from New York earlier this year to lead the agency’s first Canadian office, told Marketing that conversations with Mini began back in March.
Taxi held the account for 10 years, regularly winning awards for its work. Taxi was invited to participate in the review, but declined, Mini Canada director Adam Shaver told Marketing.
Of the review, Shaver said, “It was a good time to look at our marketing landscape and see if we were OK with what we were doing so far. It was a very hard decision. We feel fantastic about the partnership we’ve had with Taxi – it has been an incredible 10 years. At the end of the day we went through this process partly to see what else was out there.”
“Because we had ambitions to open our office in Canada since the beginning of the year we had our ear to the street and heard the business was coming up for review and proactively reached out to the Mini client,” said Rodriguez.
“We invited them in to see the office and the staff we had hired and how operational we were,” he said. “We opened our office beginning of April and we joined the pitch process shortly after that.”
During the Mini RFP the agency presented strategic positioning for the brand in addition to a full campaign, said Rodriguez. “We went in with some big ideas and how they could execute those ideas across multiple channels.”
Rodriguez said the agency found out over the weekend that it had won the Mini account and isn’t yet sure if any of the spec creative will make it to market. Anomaly and Mini have their first meeting to discuss creative Thursday.
At first, work on the Mini account will be shared between Anomaly’s Toronto and New York, said Rodriguez, adding that he is in final conversations with a shortlist of candidates for the CD position.
The Budweiser account, which was handed to the agency from Grip Limited last month after the beer brand decided to consolidate work with a global brand AOR, is handled in the same manner.
At the time, J.R. Edwards, marketing manager for Budweiser Canada said, “With the recent opening of Anomaly’s Toronto office, it made sense to centralize all of our creative and digital work with one agency.”
