On a brisk Friday morning in October, employees at The Hive are doing their best to live up to the Toronto agency’s name. The main reception area and kitchen thrum with activity, bodies and exuberant voices darting to and fro, propelled by a cranked-up indie rock soundtrack. Later that day, these people will create advertisements, events, websites and social media campaigns for clients ranging from Cadbury to Jack Daniel’s. For now, they are making breakfast, sending wafts of syrupy French toast and fresh sausage into the air.
“We actually pump that smell out into the street and it attracts all the creatives,” jokes Simon Creet, vice-president and chief creative offi cer at The Hive.
Though he speaks with his tongue in his cheek, Creet also speaks from experience as one of three senior players The Hive has attracted in the past 18 months. Along with VP of client services Trent Fulton and VP of strategy and emerging platforms Sabaa Quao, Creet represents an investment in talent and diversifi ed capabilities that The Hive has embarked on even as the recession forced many competitors to prune head counts.
“There was a lot of integrating of three new people and it takes a while to do that,” says Fulton. “But I think it’s paid off this year, because we’ve won a ton of new business, which in this economy is surprising in and of itself.”
Among the prizes claimed by The Hive this year are a spot in the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation’s six-agency pool–including the lead role on OLG’s Pro-Line account–and an ambitious project for Cadbury that has earned the agency additional work for several of the company’s brands.
The Cadbury project, called The Bicycle Factory, was a kitchen-sink campaign that included everything from a traditional television ad to online innovation to the shipping of bikes to Ghana. The initiative involved consumers “building” bikes by entering UPC codes from Cadbury products to an online microsite– each code represented a bicycle part, with 100 parts required to complete a bike. It resulted in 5,000 bikes shipped to an African community in need.
“We had over 400,000 UPC entries online–120,000 unduplicated entries. That’s an unbelievable number,” says John Phillipson, vice-president, chocolate for Cadbury North America. That number is even more impressive to Phillipson because there was no prize attached to the campaign–consumers were simply asked to buy more of Cadbury’s product.
“I’m really high on The Hive right now,” says Phillipson. “They’ve got great planning skills, their people are really smart, they get the culture context, they get the consumer, they get the brand.”
The Hive is also working on Cadbury’s “Eyebrows” campaign for Dairy Milk.
Inspired by the global TV spot in which two kids twitch their eyebrows to a fastpaced tune, The Hive created an interactive promotion in which consumers could decipher codes using an alphabet based on eyebrow expressions.
But it’s not only new business that has contributed to The Hive’s 8% revenue growth in fi scal 2009. The agency has also been active with longtime clients such as Miller Genuine Draft , expanding on MGD’s Nothing to Hide campaign, which launched last year and has helped spur a 9% increase in sales this year.
“The numbers have been going up even in the past year, in a soft beer market, and that’s a great compliment to what The Hive did ,” says Peter Bombaci, brand manager, MGD for Molson, the beer’s Canadian distributor.
Clients are quick to praise The Hive for its understanding of the full gamut of marketing channels, from television ads to street-level events to social media initiatives such as its Campus Battle for Rogers, a Facebook campaign that gave university students the chance to win a Death Cab For Cutie concert at their school.
The agency isn’t too proud to get its hands dirty to see campaigns through “ the last inch,” says Hive vice-president Rick Shaver, referring to those fi nal few moments when a marketer’s branding efforts are supposed to translate into bottom-line results.
“This year really put that positioning to the test, because as clients looked around at their agency partners, they said, ‘OK, we’re under some pressure here–who’s closest to the transaction with customers?’ ” Shaver explains. “We start with the transaction and build the 360-degree plan out from that.”
Building such plans has allowed The Hive to continue building its revenues, its client roster and its staff complement, now at 105, up a dozen heads from a year ago. In a year when so much went sour, something clearly smells good at The Hive. It’s either the syrup or the success.
