Cossette will open a Chicago office after winning the business of the McDonald’s Owner/Operators of Chicagoland and Northwest Indiana Co-op following an international strategic and creative agency review.
Alyssa Huggins
Cossette is now the lead advertising agency for the co-op, which includes about 500 McDonald’s restaurants.
The agency has a long-standing relationship with the brand, having been McDonald’s Canada’s lead creative agency for 37 years for English and French markets. This is its first U.S. assignment for McDonald’s.
“We are fortunate enough to be one of the partners around the table with McDonald’s and other operators,” says Cossette president and CEO Brett Marchand. “What they were most impressed with was the success that McDonald’s Canada has had. For the last five years, it has really been one of the standouts in the world.”
As part of the deal, Cossette will open its first American office in Chicago in May. It will be lead by Alyssa Huggins, who ran Cossette’s McDonald’s business for the Ontario region before leaving for BIMM in 2012. The new office will have about 20 employees to start.
“We’ve put senior management in place from Cossette to transfer the DNA, and then the rest will be local,” says Marchand, adding they’ll be looking to hire a diverse staff, as “one of the big topics with the owner-operators in the U.S. was about ethnicity.”
The region also encompasses the McDonald’s global headquarters. “All eyes are going to be on our work,” says Marchand.
“The thing I’m most looking forward to – the great thing about this – is it’s like going to back to our entrepreneurial roots of starting things up.”
