Cossette is welcoming clients to the “Jungle” with the opening of a stand-alone media agency in Toronto.
The new shop, called Jungle Media, will cater to media-only efforts for international brands like Coke, Nike and Cadbury, said Cossette’s president and COO Brett Marchand.
These are clients that often require a level of partnership with outside creative agencies, he said. For example, taking a campaign for Nike that’s born out of the U.S. and making it applicable to the Canadian marketplace.
Meanwhile, Cossette Media will continue to work on integrated campaigns for what Marchand said is mostly Canadian clients like Shopper’s Drug Mart and the Bank of Montreal.
Sheri Metcalfe and Cindy Drown share vice-president and co-managing director titles at the new agency.
Terry Horton, who has been sharing VP associate media director duties with both Metcalfe and Drown at Cossette Media, has been promoted to VP media director.
The agency’s name is representative of the rapid changes happening within the media landscape, and is also bilingual, said Marchand.
“The world of media used to be a field and now it’s like a jungle, where there’s lot of species and it can be very complicated and you need someone to navigate through the jungle,” he said.
Marchand said Jungle would likely expand to other offices across the country, and is currently assessing the Halifax and Vancouver markets.
The agency officially opened today with IKEA as the first client on its roster. The home furnishings retailer was with Mindshare until earlier this year when the Jungle team pitched for the business.
However, the team did so under the Cossette Media name and later told IKEA of its plan to open a stand-alone agency, said Marchand.
“We won the business on the credential of Sheri and her team,” he said. “We told them we were thinking of an idea, and said we would like to launch it with IKEA and they were ecstatic about the idea.”
In a release, Thom Kyle, marketing manager, IKEA Canada said Jungle Media “understands our tongue in cheek approach to marketing and is able to secure creative placement of our message while delivering on our business goals.”
Marchand wouldn’t say which clients would make the move to Jungle. However, “if you look at our list of clients… it’s not to hard to figure out who would fit in one bucket rather than another,” he said.
Jungle is the first new marketing services venture to launch in Canada since Cossette approved its acquisition by Mill Road Capital last December, ending its 10-year run as a publicly owned company. It’s one of several projects in the works, said Marchand.
