When Sid Lee unveiled its “House Party” campaign for Adidas Originals late last year, the ads were as much a statement about the agency as they were about Adidas.
The debut spot was a riot of skaters, hipsters and artists among celebrities recognized as the hottest in their fi elds. It’s a scene full of style and groove. The party, like the agency, just seems cool.
It makes you want to be there.
Ask junior creatives and students where they want to work and many will mention Sid Lee. Likewise, senior executives revere the Montreal-based creative shop as a place where innovation and integration are more than buzzwords on the homepage. Its growing international reputation may have blossomed with brands like Cirque du Soleil and Adidas, but it has grown since then.
After opening offi ces in Amsterdam last year and Paris this year, the company landed work with video game maker Ubisoft, the massive Paris auto show Mondial de L’Automobile, and the Eurostar rail company. It also expanded its relationship with Adidas to include retail design assignments for its SLVR stores and interactive work on the Y3 brand.
There have been successful smaller, more niche projects this year as well, such as the Muvbox. The mobile restaurant unfolds out of a recycled cargo container, serving Quebec specialty foods in urban locations.
Perhaps its most visible work this year came after being hired to handle the rebranding of Videotron, the Quebec telecom and cable provider that spent more than $33 million in measured media in 2008. Sid Lee launched a massive marketing campaign in April to reintroduce the company to the market.
Across this newly expanded agency and thanks to more than 10 new client assignments, annual revenues are up approximately 10%.
It’s celebrating by shaking things up for its clients. Its most recent work for longtime client Aeroplan brought a number of its partners together for a program unlike anything in Aeroplan’s history. Sid Lee created the “Mile Maximizer” program as part of the company’s 25th anniversary. David Klein, Aeroplan’s vice-president, marketing planning and program development, calls the idea “quite innovative. It’s the fi rst time in 25 years we’ve ever had our largest partners come together” to cross-promote and reward consumers for using brands within the partner group.”
Fly Air Canada and you’ll get the standard bonus miles. But if you pay for the tickets with American Express, another Aeroplan partner, you’ll get even more bonus miles. Sid Lee came up with the idea and played liaison between the various players before creating the ad campaign.
“That’s new for Aeroplan and new for loyalty programs,” Klein adds. Looking back on his more than 20 years experience at FCB Direct, he adds, “I’m not sure if other agencies could crack that challenge. Sid brings the ability to get at the consumer’s ‘net takeaway’ and find creative solutions to achieve that.”
For Tourisme Montreal, Sid Lee recommended shifting every marketing dollar online. “They confront us every day with new ideas, new ways of doing business,” says Emanuelle Legault, director of communication for the nonprofit organization. “They’re not precious. Some agencies, when they make a bad decision, stick to their guns because they don’t want to look bad. Sid Lee is definitely not that. They’re here to make it work. They’ll go back to the drawing board to do things over.”
So far that hasn’t been the case. Adding to the award-winning tourism website it created last year, Sid Lee found five “Montreal insiders” to blog about various aspects of life in the city. While the city’s tourism dollars have dropped (just as they have in most Canadian cities during the recession), Legault reports increases in every one of the site’s engagement metrics, keeping Montreal in the mix for those planning to travel when consumer confidence rebounds.
More people have been added to the party inside the company as well, with the creation of Sid Lee Architecture and Jimmy Lee, an in-house production company. The agency still works with third-party production houses, but “some of the web production we do involves new ways of doing things that other production companies weren’t familiar with,” says Jean-François Bouchard, Sid Lee’s president.
“We ended up coaching suppliers to do production work, so we decided to establish our own setup. TV production companies have an approach that fits advertising quite well, but when you try to apply to that creating content for a social network, for example, they’re at a bit of a loss.”
