From ex-Cossette vice-president to X president, Cathy Collier is launching a new “connection planning” company in partnership with Toronto-based agency Zig.
The new firm called X Connections Inc. is jointly owned by Collier and Zig, which has the majority stake. It will operate as an independent affiliate, serving interested Zig clients but free to seek its own business.
Collier recently left her position as senior vice-president, media director at Cossette Media, where she had worked for 18 years.
The new venture will create detailed profiles of client’s targeted consumers to determine where and how to best reach them through either traditional or non-traditional means.
“We want to liberate communication from advertising,” Collier said. “Advertising might be the solution, but it doesn’t have to be.”
Collier describes her new business as being part of “the marketing process versus the advertising process.
“We’ll do a lot of work determining who the right consumer is through segmentation and profiling… leading to an understanding of when we want to talk to them and what the connection idea is.
“We’re saying ‘x’ is where the target and that idea intersect.”
Collier is the only employee of X to launch, with new staff added as business picks up.
Zig president Andy Macaulay said the idea for the company spawned from conversations following the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in 2007 where Collier was a media jurist. That year Zig won two Lions for its Scream TV campaign, which used a projected “ghost” in an old house to promote the horror movie specialty channel.
“We won a bronze medal in the Global Media Agency of the Year competition,” Macaulay said. “The irony was that at the time we didn’t even have a media group and the Scream campaign had very little paid media in it. I called up Cathy when she got back and asked her what she thought was going on.”
Clearly, there was a growing appetite to complement traditional media with non-traditional forms.
Macaulay said connection planning won’t replace his six-person media team or Zig’s relationships with other media agencies. Instead it will “dovetail” with those operations.
He likens the change to the advent of account planning.
“Before account planning was born, obviously agencies were writing briefs and doing creative strategies,” he said. “But account planning was an opportunity to focus research skills, brief-writing skills, analytical skills and even creative skills in one group of people to get better briefs. In that sense connection planning does the same thing. It’s taking consumer insight, media, analytical and creative skills and focusing them in a new discipline. It will get us more powerful connections with consumers.”
