Capital C

The Cube hits the Globe!

Our Nissan Hypercube Campaign was just featured in The Globe and Mail- Nissan Cube.

In Conversation With Corrine: President of Fresh Intelligence

Real-time Intel-gathering has quickly become a key weapon in a marketer's arsenal. To learn more about what it entails, we chatted with Corrine Sandler- President of Fresh Intelligence, Cap C's exclusive research arm, and this week's 'Woman of the Week' at Women's Post.
Key snippets from our tête-à-tête below:

Q: How has Fresh Intelligence grown/changed since partnering with Capital C and moving into our digs? What is your vision for Fresh Intel over the next few years and how does Cap C contribute to it?

C: We've enjoyed immense growth through the incredible Capital C client roster as well the credibility and exposure Cap C has brought to Fresh Intelligence.
Capital C and FI have the same vision – building brands through  consumers and shoppers' eyes. If the insight is right, everything else is right.
Our vision is to be the most “creative” dynamic intel-gathering company in North America. Working within Capital C's visionary and entrepreneurial environment is an asset that enables us to get there.

Q: What is the core philosophy behind Fresh Intelligence that distinguishes it from other research firms? What assets are you able to leverage that give you a leg-up over the competition?

C: It’s a combination of our technology platform, our people and our thinking. We don’t engage in traditional conservative methodology. We push the limits of market research and Enterprise feedback management. Today its all about cost, speed and accuracy and FI delivers way above competitors on all three.

Q: Here at Cap C, we've been exploring consumer interaction through many of our recent campaigns such as the Nissan Cube Launch.Give us your thoughts on consumer engagement as a means to gain insight. Do you reckon it's the future of your field?

C: Of course, market research today is about consumer engagement, it’s about a dialogue not interruptive monologue. The only way to learn from consumers today is to engage them and put them at the heart of marketing. That’s why online panels are slated to grow by 54% in 2009- within 5 years every brand, organization etc. will own one…. We're on the leading edge of this.

Q: Marketing has changed dramatically over the past few years, and those who haven't adapted have been swept away. In order to flourish in today's environment, what new skills/qualities must a marketer bring to the table?

C: Creativity and an experiential nature. We need to constantly experiment, find new ways to gain knowledge, reach our market and learn from them.
Marketing is a combination of gut feel and science, and those that can bridge the gap and act swiftly in today’s dynamic marketplace will inevitably be the winners. It’s the calculated risk that's going to reap the reward.

Corrine named 'Woman of the Week'!

Corrine Sandler, President of Fresh Intelligence, was named 'Woman of the Week' at Women's Post magazine.

Partnering with Fresh Intelligence has allowed Cap C to move to a 'collect and collaborate' model.  By tapping into their tech expertise and real-time research savvy, we're able to arrive at just-out-the-oven insights. Mmmm

Full interview & photos here. Kudos Corrine!

Alterna and Us

Alterna hires Cap C for rebranding, exciting stuff!

Thinking Outside the Cube

Great article in the National Post on our Cube experiment!

Tony- AdLounge Twitter Interview

Here she be

More Insight On 'Hypercube' from Jesse Hirsh

http://jessehirsh.com/hypercube-casting-a-reality-tv-show

The Hypercube and Open Source Marketing

Jesse Hirsh's brilliant post about our little social creativity project.

CAPITAL IDEAS

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.

Capital C Named Best of Best

THE HARD SELL
Keith McArthur, 01/12/06 at 12:21 PM EST

Capital C CEO Tony Chapman was a little annoyed when he first learned his marketing agency was shortlisted in the "promotions" category at Marketing Magazine's Marque awards.

While Capital C built its reputation creating in-store retail marketing campaigns, the Toronto agency has grown into an everything-but-advertising marketing shop that does branding, customer relationship management and Web campaigns. He would have preferred a nomination in the full-service agency category, where he could compete with the Taxis and Rethinks of the world.

He certainly felt better last night after Capital C was selected best of the best.

In a new format this year, Marketing picked one agency in each of six categories, and one overall winner. Here are the rest of the results:

• Taxi as Full Service/Creative Agency of the Year
• Proximity in the Digital Agency of the Year
• OMD Canada as Media Agency of the Year
• Wunderman as Direct Agency of the Year
• National Public Relations as PR Agency of the Year
• And Capital C as Promotional Agency of the Year