By PAUL-MARK RENDON
Amid swift social change that's taking
marketers from impressions to interactions, Capital C is Marketing's
2006 AGENCY OF THE YEAR for incubating new brands, developing
non-traditional marketing efforts and evolving from a shop that simply
creates promotions, to one that promotes creations
2006 Agency of the Year: Capital C
Tony Chapman has a bit of a cold, but it's tough to notice unless he
raises his voice. "I'll be fine," he says. "I better be." Walking
briskly along Toronto's King Street East on a sunny fall afternoon, the
50-year-old, scruffy chic CEO of Toronto's Capital C agency is on his
way to give a pep talk to Pfizer's marketing team.
It's a presentation he's given umpteen times to a number of
marketers this year, complete with an accompanying slide show,
perfectly choreographed transitions and persuasive stats that
illustrate points he knows well enough to recite in his sleep.
He'll ask you if you have a PVR and tell you that, when he was a
kid, he would go home after school and watch Hogan's Heroes. He'll tell
you that, nowadays, consumers are spending their time much differently.
They're designing their own MySpace pages or publishing their own books
or creating digital animation that would beat Disney's best work just
15 years ago.
He'll point out how only 41% of teenagers choose a face-to-face
breakup over a quick and painless text message-even when they're
sitting next to each other. Amusing, except when you consider the
marketing consequences of all the new behaviour. "The more time they
spend with a mouse," he'll say, pausing for effect, "the less they
leave the house, and the less they connect to mass media."
This, of course, is where an agency like Capital C comes in. Amid
turbulent social change in which marketers have been forced to go from
impressions to interactions-as Chapman says, from "males age 18-to-29"
to "jsmith@ yahoo.com"-and from carpet-bombing their messages to more
surgical communication, Cap C has cast itself as an agency of the new
era. It's the central reason why Marketing has named it 2006 Agency of
the Year.
The numbers prove it's a direction other agencies will want to
follow. Stats from sources including Universal McCann's Coen Report,
the 2004 Promo Industry Trends Report and the Direct Marketing
Association, indicate that of the $600 billion spent on marketing in
2004, more than two-thirds, $423 billion, was spent on anything but
advertising.
And that's exactly where you'll find Capital C. Last year, it
acquired a 50% stake in P2P, a Montreal experiential marketing company.
It also picked up Toronto-based database marketing expert Kenna Group,
giving it the infrastructure to develop those highly targeted marketing
campaigns that Chapman says will be commonplace in the future.
What's most interesting, though, is that 14-year-old Capital C, an
agency that made its name as a promotional marketing expert, has gone
from simply creating promos to promoting creations. The shop has
managed to convince marketers to let it build new brands from scratch,
or overhaul existing ones that need renovations, and pull off some
crazy-enough-to-work ideas in the process.
For vintner Andrew Peller Limited of Grimsby, Ont., Cap C came up with
a new brand of wine called XOXO, which launched in August and is
targeted less at stodgy wine snobs and more at women who simply want
good wine for Girls Night In.
Cap C, under the watch of creative director Bennett Klein, came up
with original ideas like borrowing iconography cues from the luxury
fragrance world and signing a spokesperson deal with model-turned
actress Tricia Helfer. Cap C even shaped the way XOXO looks in-store,
with full-colour box shippers that, when stacked, spell out the brand's
name and practically scream out at anyone browsing down the aisle. In
its first four weeks in-market, 36,000 bottles were shipped out, says
Terry Sauriol, Peller's director of marketing, putting XOXO on track to
becoming a Canadian top 10 wine by next year. In-store conversion
samplings, he adds, are running between 35% and 50%. "Usually, if you
get 15% to 20% you'd be pleased," he says.
"I called around to a couple people, to gauge who they thought would
be good to help us develop a new brand package," Sauriol recalls.
"Everyone said 'you gotta go to Cap C.' "
Part of the reason for that vigorous support, says Dale Hooper,
director of brand marketing at Frito Lay Canada, is Cap C's ideation
process, one in which no goal is too big. Hooper still gets excited by
an idea Cap C came up with for Lay's potato chips to find Canada's
greatest hockey fan-and then induct him or her into the Hockey Hall of
Fame. "And we did it!" exclaims Hooper, still somewhat incredulously.
The winner, Mike Brideau of North Bay, Ont., was honoured in a ceremony
this fall. For next to nothing, the contest got approximately 18
million media impressions, Hooper says.
While Cap C is getting used to incubating new brands and developing
non-traditional marketing efforts, the agency will still have a hard
time shaking its promo handle. It won three golds at the 2006 Promo!
Awards for its work with Unilever and Microsoft. For Unilever's
ThermaSilk hair care brand, it created the "Hit on my Hot Guy" website
that allowed visitors to play virtual dress-up with images of their
ideal men. Average time spent on the site was a whopping 53 minutes,
whereas comparable sites might be happy getting people to stay for 10.
"They're just at the top of their game," says one Toronto marketing
executive, who says he appreciates the shop's leadership depth, with
savvy partners like vice-president, general manager Tom Clune, CFO
Vickie Calverley and managing director Matthew Diamond.
Still, Cap C has had its share of stumbles. Chapman is blunt about
the company's failed attempt to start a public relations division two
years ago, which perhaps was doomed since most of Cap C's clients
already had their own PR outfits. "We got greedy," he says. And little
known is the fact that Cap C helped develop the concept for Kraft
Hockeyville, the CBC reality series that sought Canada's most diehard
hockey town. Chapman says the agency failed to show Kraft how it would
execute in-store, and the two sides went in different directions.
Despite that, the company has made enough waves to land project work
for McDonald's headquarters in Chicago and a new North American
assignment for ICI Paints in Cleveland, Ohio. Ditto a new assignment
for RBC Financial Group in Toronto. The agency, with about 85
full-timers, is moving to a bigger space to accommodate its growing
staff. Revenues, which were just $1.75 million in 1999, totalled $16
million in 2005 and are expected to hit $25 million this year.
Back on King Street, Chapman talks as he walks to the Pfizer
off-site. Over the years, he's managed to distill his rules for selling
(solutions, not sales; value, not price). He learned a lot about
business from his mother, who set him up with a lemonade stand when he
was a kid. In mid-stride, he points at a storefront display of picture
frames. "Things like those," he says. "I could never sell. I like
selling ideas. I like selling the intangible, and then watching it
become something real."
And his idea of an agency for a new marketing era has become reality, too.