The world according to Tyler Brûlé

Tyler Brûlé apologizes for the sirens. “It’s bomb chaos,” he says, calmly. He has called on his mobile from the streets of London, Eng., the day police defused a bomb in the city’s downtown. Media outlets send throngs of reporters to the British capital. Not Monocle, the new London-based magazine about “global affairs, business, culture and design” of which Brûlé is editor-in-chief and chairman. “The London bomb is a local story, but it has everything to do with what is happening in various corners of the world,” says the 38-year-old. “It is far more important to deploy your correspondents further into the field, well beyond the shores of the enceinte, to get to that story. That is what we’re doing with Monocle.”

It’s the second Brûlé magazine aimed at the global audience he improbably tapped with Wallpaper*, the international design bible that established the Winnipeg-born entrepreneur as a bona-fide tastemaker. By doing so, he’s straddling the editorial-advertising divide: Since departing Wallpaper* in 2002, he has turned his aesthetic eye to advertising, running an ad agency with annual billings of US$20 million, according to Brûlé, for such global brands as adidas, BMW and Nokia. His formula for both: Treat the planet as one massive marketplace. That approach has returned the quintessential jet-setter to his native land, where he has created the branding for downtown Toronto airline Porter, and has worked for Montreal-based Bombardier. He also has lofty ambitions for Monocle in Canada. Our nation, it turns out, is on his global radar.

Brûlé, son of former Winnipeg Blue Bombers player Paul Brule, started out as a journalist. After dropping out of Ryerson (according to the Toronto university’s website, he found working as a waiter at M venpick more exciting than attending the school’s journalism program), he moved to the U.K. as a reporter for the BBC. In 1994 while reporting on the war in Afghanistan, he was shot, leaving him without the use of his left hand. When he returned to the U.K., he launched Wallpaper* and, a year later in 1997, sold it to Time Warner for a reported US$2.3 million. At the time, the title was already distributed in more than 50 countries. In 2002, he bought back from Time Warner Wink Media, an agency that created customized Wallpaper* ads for advertisers. “It had become the much bigger revenue generator,” explains Brûlé. He renamed the agency Winkreative.

Winkreative quickly made a name for itself outside of Wallpaper*, not surprisingly, in the air travel industry. The agency rebranded Swiss International Air into a luxury airline, making over staff uniforms, corporate signage and even its airport lounge. In 2004, Montreal-based Bombardier hired Winkreative to create the brand identity and print material for its new C-Series fleet of small passenger aircraft, as well as the exhibit for the fleet’s debut at the Farnborough Air Show in England. “Tyler is a man with a brain that goes a mile a minute, and I remember having these lengthy discussions about his travel experiences,” says Ben Boehm, program director, director of marketing, for Bombardier Aerospace’s new commercial aircraft program. Ultimately, Boehm says he was most impressed by the agency’s no-nonsense work ethic: “He and his agency are to the point. They don’t give you fluff. All the other agencies [who pitched for the business] went into it like they were branding orange juice.”

Robert Deluce, president and CEO of Porter Airlines, almost didn’t hire Brûlé. They first met at the Four Seasons in New York, and Brûlé was uncharacteristically late. “I was not sure that we were going to be a good match-airlines are not supposed to be late,” says Deluce. “But by the time we concluded our two-hour meeting, I was relatively sure that [his agency] would be a strong contender and he did not disappoint us. He is international in terms of vision and scope, and could be calling you from any part of the world on any given day, and yet he can relate to an entrepreneurial enterprise in terms of being able to conceptualize the final outcome.”

Brûlé’s international vision lent itself to Porter. “We wanted Porter to exude sophistication and that pared-down liberty you would see on a private aircraft,” says Brûlé. That’s why he had budget discussions, for instance, to explain why the aircraft should be outfitted with plush leather seats made by Lantel, a Swiss company. Of course, not everyone agrees partnering with an agency with such a global, not local, view is the way to go (see “An air of sophistication” p.13).

For his part, Deluce would like Brûlé to open a Toronto office. “As much as Bob has tried to bend our arm and even offer us desks and space, we feel committed to headquarters in Zurich, creative in London and account management in New York and Tokyo. We can manage the Middle East from London and Zurich, and likewise New York City is the best connected city in North America.” The point: geography has little impact on how Brûlé operates. A major project to overhaul a Texas bank, for example, is managed from London and not New York. “There are three flights a day from London to Houston,” he points out.

Given the success of Winkreative, it is perhaps surprising Brûlé would venture fully back into journalism. But as such reputable media organizations like Time have shuttered foreign bureaus, he believes the market is ripe for a magazine targeting business travellers. In its press materials, Monocle’s target market is described to be “as much aimed at the Spanish banker living in London as the Finnish architect in Zurich… readers who probably don’t live in their country of birth, whose work takes them to several different countries a week and who thought they had outgrown news and business magazines as we currently know them.” In other words, a reader like Brûlé.

Articles in the June issue range from the erection of gaudy mansions in Afghanistan by businessmen flush with cash from the opium industry to the growth of a Korean-style yogurt franchise in the U.S. called Pinkberry. Each issue features a world map highlighting the countries that Monocle dispatched journalists to.

Another distinction: Even though Brûlé is part-time editor and part-time advertising executive, with Monocle he has strictly separated church and state, believing too many media today have “sold their soul.” No third-party subsidized trips for reporters and photographers. No regurgitating PR copy. No paying for celebrity interviews or photos (“there is so much fatigue from that, we wanted to be an oasis from celebrity culture.”) That commitment to editorial integrity is why Monocle is so pricey: C$12.50 (US$10). “If you want to have news delivered objectively, that comes with a cost,” says Brûlé. “That is why we also have to be very hard in negotiating advertising terms with brands and likewise be clear with consumers that is why we do have that cover price.” Advertisers in the 178-page June issue, the magazine’s fourth, include American Apparel, Netjets and Rolex.

Early sales results show some countries are hot, others not so much. The U.S. and the U.K. are neck-and-neck as the top-selling market, but Brûlé was initially surprised to see Germany so close behind, although he says Germans are used to thick, newsy magazines. “I thought [the number three market] would have been Canada or Australia,” he says, when in fact Canada is particularly disappointing. “On a per capita basis we have more subscribers full-stop in Australia than Canada, which is quite amazing.” He theorizes that the lack of international newsstands, such as the defunct Lichtman’s, has hurt Monocle’s Canadian potential.

Nevertheless Brûlé established his career by creating a global media vehicle, and he believes Monocle is the next big thing. “We’re looking at other print extensions for the brand and expanding our broadcast reach. At the same time we’re looking at both online retail and bricks-and-mortar shop opportunities,” he says. Spoken like a man who knows no boundaries, geographic or otherwise.

Chris Daniels is a writer in Toronto