This story has been updated.
Creative agency Rethink has laid off approximately one-quarter of its staff, letting go 22 people in its Vancouver office and one employee in Toronto.
Chris Staples, an agency partner and co-founder, said that while Rethink has not lost any accounts, some major clients have had cutbacks. By late in 2010, the agency reported a total headcount of 80 after opening a Toronto office and winning a number of new accounts. Staples said the agency had since peaked at 100 staffers – 79 in Vancouver and 21 in Toronto.
“The business is changing and what we are seeing is clients going through this huge digital shift and budgets being tight and mergers happening,” he said. “It’s just uncertain times.”
Staples said Rethink has gone through a major restructuring. “We were a traditional agency in Vancouver that dabbled in digital. Now we are a national agency with offices in Toronto and Vancouver, and we are a digital agency that does traditional, so it’s been a huge change,” said Staples.
Toronto is also becoming more central to the agency’s bottom line. “Within a year or two, the Toronto office will probably be bigger than the Vancouver office. You can see that’s where the fish are in Canadian marketing.”
Like many Canadian agencies, the company’s human resource needs are also in flux as new digital roles such as community managers, digital strategists and web developers are in demand. “Our clients are shifting in that direction and we are getting projects that we would never have got before.”
Last year Rethink won the SoloMobile.ca website account in both English and French, as well as accounts with Metro Newspapers, Egg Farmers of Canada, Muskoka Cottage Brewery, Toronto’s Eye Weekly, Post Media and Kraft Foods.
