Knowledge is key. School is essential. It should be where you learn to doubt.

Q: Please give us a brief bio of yourself.
A: Born before we landed on the moon. Started drawing in the sixties. Never stopped being creative since then. I was, I am, an illustrator, a graphic designer, an interactive designer, a creative director and an ad man. I’m now Executive Creative Director at TAXI Montréal.

Q: What do you do for inspiration?
A: Life is the greatest muse. Where you get true insights. So I try to live as much as I can.

Q: What do you regard as being your biggest achievement?
A: Pothole Season (the app & the launch campaign) was a fantastic project. Probably, and considering results, my best work until now. Go to http://www.youtube.com/potholeseason to know more about the project. Another great piece of work was Battle for Beauty for Internet Explorer 9, a project we (TAXI MTL) did with Quatre Cent Quatre and Moment Factory: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcWd8PpXIcg

Q: How do you relax or unwind?
A: I ride my bike.

Q: What’s your favourite part of your job? What’s the hardest part of your job? What do you do when you get stuck?
A: Favourite part: meeting so many talented people. From all crafts. It’s a great priviledge.

Hardest part: creating the exceptional. But it’s the best feeling ever when you achieve it.

When I get stuck I take a nap.

Q: If there are any pivotal experiences/decisions you could point to that helped shape your career, what would they be?
A: In ‘95 I agreed to design a website for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The decade of interactive work that followed shaped who I am and how I do things today.

Q: What area of web design lacks the most?
A:We are great at creating amazing and beautifully crafted experiences. We suck at delivering on the message. Efficiently. Good copywriting is a start. There are lessons we might learn from the past one hundred years of advertising.

Q: Are there any websites that have shone through as being pioneering in the last 5 years or so?
A: I’m now a big user of applications. My wife & my three kids too. A few years ago we were all over websites. Now, in a normal day, my 3 kids are on gaming apps, my wife is learning Spanish on an app and I’m spending all my free time on photo apps. It ‘s the year of the app baby!

Q: Has winning FWA awards helped you in any way?
A: The industry sees the FWA award as a symbol of high standards in ideas and craft. It’s always great for your work to be recognized like that. And it’s a great server test!

Q: When dealing with major clients, how difficult is it to meet the needs of such wide target audiences?
A: I use all the tools at my disposal. Interactive, new media, classic media, PR, content, apps, you name it. I create the right mix for each task. Difficult? Not really. More fun then ever.

Q: What did your very first site look like? Is it still online?
A: As I mentioned earlier, it was a museum site. It was quite clean, elegant and well organized. It was live for years. We were pushing bandwidth limits with all of our crazy animated gifs!

Q: Have you written any books, if not do you plan to?
A: I have this dream of doing a movie one day. So I guess I should start writing the script now. A photography exhibit might be in the near future as well.

Q: Are there things you do OUTSIDE of work to ensure that you are in the right mindset to be creative and/or successful in whatever you are doing?
A: Photography gives me great pleasure. I use my iPhone for shooting, editing and posting. Quite a creative hobby, I tell you.

Q: What was the last digital effort you saw (or were a part of) that used social media in a way that really made sense. Why?
A: For Pothole Season, we launched the app with a stunt. A red car in a giant pothole. The image of that car was shot by everyone that morning and naturally went viral in a few minutes. Social media really worked for us that day!

Q: The web is getting out of the web. Do you find that thinking in digital solutions alone hinders you? Do you feel the urge to solve the problem using all mediums necessary?
A: Today we have no choice but to be media and medium agnostic. It’s the fun part of working in our field in 2012. Everything is possible. Finding a different mix, a different solution is a blast.

Q: What are your views on design/graphic school. Do you think someone can get into the field without educational experience in a school environment?
A: Knowledge is key. School is essential. It should be where you learn to doubt.

Q: If you were a student entering this industry or an aspiring FWA award submitter, what advice would you give them?
A: When you think you worked your ass off, work even harder. Good is not good enough.

Q: What would be your ultimate vehicle to travel in?
A: A horse. I love horses.

Q: How do you keep your finger on the pulse of the latest web trends?
A: I listen, look and interact with life.

Q: Any parting shots or pearls of wisdom?
A: At TAXI we say “Doubt the conventional. Create the exceptional”. In short, be the greatest shit disturber ever.

Q: It has been a privilege, thanks very much
A: Thanks Rob.

Boston Pizza is attempting to show up its competition during the hockey playoff season with a boneless wing created by a fictional culinary expert.

Last year the restaurant called upon the “Professional Wing Critics Association” to weigh in on its wings and now the spotlight has turned to Terry Peters, a (fictional) “world-renowned food innovator” who is said to have created Boston Pizza’s new All Meat Wings.

The restaurant/sports bar is introducing the man who claims to be the brains behind the “seedless watermelon” and “piggies in a blanket” with a campaign with creative from Taxi and media by PHD, spanning TV, radio, online and social media.

Last year’s “Flatties & Drummies” campaign was a success, with a 162% increase in sales attributed to the effort, as compared to 2010 wing sales. Joanne Forrester, VP of marketing, Boston Pizza, says that the brand wanted to build on that momentum with a “wings 2.0” campaign that will make a bigger impact through the introduction of a new and innovative food offering.

“When you look at some of the advertising we’ve done in the last couple of years, we’ve developed what we believe are key drivers for brand success. [And] one of them is around developing ownable properties,” she says. “Instead of coming out and saying that we have a new wing, we hire a food innovator and produce a high-impact campaign, launching during the playoffs when we know there will be high audience numbers. For us, it goes back to making the ordinary the extraordinary and telling a story in a unique and compelling way.”

Rolling out this week and continuing to drum up excitement until June 9, the campaign will see 60-, 30- and 15-second spots air on national channels, including CBC and TSN, during the playoffs. Along with the TV spots that target men aged 25 to 54, there will be online ads on sports sites including NHL.com, TSN.ca, ESPN.com and Yahoo! Sports, as well as on The Score’s mobile platforms.

Watch the video

Strategy Online - Jennifer Horn

Last week Mini Canada owners were shown some red-light love with impromptu birthday celebrations in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver to celebrate the car co’s 10th anniversary in Canada.

When a Mini Canada driver pulled up to a stoplight, a street team from Taxi 2 and Smak Toronto surrounded the car and busted out a small party, complete with streamers, balloons and music. Once the party was over (when the light turned green), the driver was given a commemorative keychain to thank them for taking part in the celebration.

Lance Martin, executive CD at Taxi 2, says the celebrations were launched as a way to thank as many Mini Canada drivers as possible for owning the car.

“We started talking about thanking each individual Mini driver personally and then thought, what about going out and trying to thank them one car at a time,” he says. “I guess we could have sent an email blast but we wanted to do something personal.”

Watch the video

Strategy Online - Val Maloney

It’s understandable that Canadians might display an attachment to homegrown brands like Tim Hortons and Swiss Chalet, but their love of Kraft Dinner can’t be boiled down to corporate genealogy.

The boxed noodles-and-cheese dinner, renamed Kraft Macaroni and Cheese in the U.S. not long after its debut in 1937, has always retained the original name in Canada as well as a cult-like following.

While the people at Kraft Canada do not spend a lot of time analyzing why we Canadians eat much more KD per capita than our U.S. counterparts do, they clearly embrace our sentimental attachment to the bright orange food as a decisive marketing opportunity.

When any brand has a different name and brand presence between countries, it ensures that its Canadian marketing and advertising platform is almost certainly a made-in-Canada effort, unlike products with the same name where the ads can be adapted from other markets such as the U.S.

“We do a lot of research, and one thing we know is that the Canadian consumer has a vested interest in this brand,” says Jordan Fietje, senior brand manager for Kraft Dinner at Toronto-based Kraft Canada. “They have a real sense of ownership over it. They are the ones that called it KD — We didn’t coin that term. We picked it up from consumers.” The advertising tag line for the last 10 years, “Gotta Be KD,” came from a consumer during a cross-country promotional tour with a branded KD car.

Postmedia News files
Kraft Dinner’s latest campaign from Toronto agency Taxi2, KD Battle Zone, is on Facebook and consists of five challenges for fans. Beginning in January, the first battle asked people to upload creative moments of “photo bombing” with KD and the winner was declared by vote on the site. The other battles have included making a gif photo, putting a caption on funny pictures involving KD and a recipe battle involving KD, “Make it Epic.” The final battle, “Freestyle” is happening now and wraps ends in two weeks.

While the “10 to one rule” — the principle that the U.S. will sell 10 times the amount of many of the same products sold in Canada, based on relative population size — is generally very applicable in many categories, Mr. Fietje said, “they only sell six times as much Kraft Dinner. That is a significant difference.”

The brand is marketed differently in Canada, he said, because a broader range of people eat it, crossing all ages and demographic groups.

“It’s not just kids who are eating it. It starts off as a kid food and then the kid becomes a teenager and it is often the first thing they learn to cook on their own. Then they head off to college [and keep eating it] and it often fits nicely into their budget. Later in life they have their own kids and start to serve it to them and eat it with them. And later as a grandparent, there is nothing more fun than giving it to your grandkids.”

In the U.S., marketing has primarily focused on the dish as an easy-to-make food for kids. “That is true here, but it goes beyond being a functional food here. There is a strong emotional connection to the brand itself.” That is borne out by research that showed most Canadians ignore the instructions, Mr. Fietje said, and believe that they have a unique way of making KD, some adding extra cheese or wieners, some making it watery.

The last advertising campaign for KD in Canada, “Oath” ran around the time of the Vancouver Olympic Games and played up that fact. Characters described how they personalized their KD: “I will only have it with ketchup,” and declared “So help me KD” at the end of each commercial.

But the KD’s Facebook campaign might be one of the clearest indications yet of how well the brand lends itself to social media. Since KD Battle Zone began, the KD Facebook page has grown from just over 120,000 fans to nearly 270,000, averaging more than 2,000 new fans a day.

The high Facebook participation is particularly impressive given that unlike many online contests, there are no prizes in the Kraft Dinner promotion. While Facebook contests are increasingly popular with marketers trying to attract young tech savvy audiences, they generally involve prizes. A current promotion on Facebook from Motorola Canada is giving away RAZR smartphones and accessory packages to winners. A Ford Mustang Facebook contest in the U.S. is awarding the winner with a two-year lease on a 2012 Mustang.

“We are very happy with how it is going,” Mr. Fietje said. “We didn’t know how many people would upload things. We are very pleased with the amount of participation.”

Taxi2 also created two TV spots intended to drive traffic to the Facebook fan page featuring the same two young men who are featured in online videos on the Facebook site that explains the battle. In one spot, “Distraction Noodle,” one of the roommates steals the other’s bowl of KD; in the other, the roomie gets the KD back.

Fiona Birch, creative director at the Toronto agency TonicGlobal, said a healthy Facebook presence gives brands great potential to further their relationships with customers, particularly for a much-loved brand. But she cautioned it is important for those emotionally charged brands to continue to interact with those consumers regularly when special contests and promotions end.

“You have to take it back to what value you give your fan base. Does the brand interaction continue after it’s over? That is the true test. There still has to be a next step.”

Financial Post - Hollie Shaw

The Montreal office of advertising agency Taxi has created an iPhone app that allows users across the world to report the location of potholes.

The app, which can be downloaded for free from Apple’s app store, launched Canada-wide last week and is now functional around the globe.

“The app works in Calcutta, Oslo, wherever you are,” said Dominique Trudeau, executive creative director at Taxi Montreal.

Trudeau said the app demonstrates Taxi’s ability to be creative with technology. “For sure, it’s an ad for us. It’s a way to promote our savoir-faire and our skills.

“When you do something that’s timely, it matters to people. Technology matters today in advertising. And utility (matters) – something that’s usable, that you can do something with.”

To mark the introduction of the pothole app, Taxi created a street installation in Montreal depicting a car jammed front-first into a massive pothole, its back end sticking up into the air.

Trudeau said the stunt, like the app itself, was designed to generate positive buzz for the agency. “The moment we put a car in the street, everybody took a picture,” said Trudeau. “That image went totally nuts over the web.

According to Trudeau, the pothole app has been downloaded 10,000 times and roughly 6,000 potholes have been reported by consumers using the app.

Marketing Magazine - Matt Semansky

MONTREAL - Passerby near Bonaventure Metro station in downtown Montreal were in for a bizarre sight Tuesday morning.

Yellow tape and police cars surrounded an upended red sports car, stuck in an enormous pothole in the road, motor still running.

Montrealers and tourists stood gawking in the rain, all taking photos and videos on their smartphones.

Knowing Montreal drivers (and the condition of some of the city’s roads), the scene on the corner of René Lévesque on de la Cathedrale street is not really a stretch of the imagination. But in fact, that’s just what it is - an imaginative publicity stunt by the ad agency, Taxi.

The stunt was created to publicize an app called Pothole Season. Designed by the advertising agency Taxi, it’s a tool to help Canadians report potholes.

“We’re having fun with it,” says Christian Quenneville, general manager at Taxi Montreal. “It was the tongue-in-cheek idea of one of our creatives.”

Users can access the app via iPhone or the Internet. The free app uses Google Map to pinpoint and tag the exact location of a pothole in any city in the world.

“The app runs everywhere,” says Christian. “We’ve even had potholes spotted at SXSW in Austin, Texas.”

The true genius behind the app is the fact that it sends an email notification the relevant local government office requesting the pothole be repaired. At the moment, these alerts only work in major centres.

“We’re a local Montreal ad agency and the app was created to celebrate our 20th anniversary,” says Quenneville. “It’s a gift to our fellow citizens.”

The app is also an indirect advertisement for Taxi itself, creating a buzz about the possibility of what it can achieve creatively and via social media.

Global News - Amanda Kelly

Discovery at the urinal

A hilarious stunt from Taxi Vancouver for the Vancouver Aquarium focused on various unorthodox “baby stories,” to promote the aquarium’s reproduction-focused exhibit.

Fake pregnancy tests were placed in urinals. They displayed a positive result when peed on by men, to illustrate that in the aquatic world, males are the ones that get pregnant.

Before there was a single Mini on the road in Canada, there was one in Taxi’s boardroom. The agency had to remove the front window just to get it in there. Lance Martin, ECD of Taxi 2 – who was on the pitch and has been working on the account ever since – remembers the stir it caused.

“That was the first time anyone could see a redesigned Mini in Canada so we had a lot of people coming in off the street saying, ‘Is it okay if I just go and look at that Mini?’”

When it finally launched on March 22, 2002, it was impossible not to look at the Mini. In addition to typical ad opps such as transit and print, the agency pulled stunts nobody had seen before, like hanging a full-sized Mini from the outside of a building in Toronto, trailed by tire tracks in the shape of a Union Jack.

“That stopped people in the street,” says Matt Kelly, ad strategy expert and managing director, Level5 Strategic Brand Advisors, when asked for his thoughts on the unusual OOH execution. “As a new entrant, they needed to capture people’s attention and their hearts and minds, and I think they did that.”

“That [stunt] sort of set the tone as a little gutsy, mischievous, shit-disturber brand,” agrees Martin.
What followed was a decade’s worth of made-you-look advertising that has taken gold at Cannes, ADCC, the One Show, the Clios and the Obies, and been picked up by Mini brand teams internationally.

Mini Canada celebrates its 10th birthday this month, and the milestone comes hot on the heels of another one. According to Adam Shaver, director, Mini Canada, last year was the first time the niche brand sold over 5,000 units in Canada. With 5,155 cars sold, it was a 15% increase over 2010.

So, how has Mini kept things fresh, gutsy and shit-disturbing throughout the decade? And what’s next as Mini expands on its core model with new offerings like the two-seat Coupe (launched in late 2011), the soft-topped Roadster (launched in February) and last year’s SUV crossover Countryman? Strategy takes a look back, and a look ahead.

Small team, giant ideas
“Back in the early days it was a guerrilla team,” Martin says. Mini Canada had a staff of two – national manager Rob Van Shaik and special projects manager Michel Matte – to launch the brand in the Great White North.

“[We’d] sit around the boardroom, not just trying to come up with advertising solutions, but also product solutions – deciding what kind of cars to launch, what colours and even how many to order,” Martin says. “Taxi, in a way, acted as a branch of their marketing department instead of just their creative department.”

While Mini Canada has grown from a two-man operation to a team of nine, Shaver says familiar faces remain on both the brand team and the agency side.

“That’s one of our strengths and one of the reasons we’ve been able to maintain our position in the market over the past 10 years,” he says. Shaver took his own leadership role at Mini in mid-2011 but has been with BMW since 2002, while Van Shaik and Matte have moved on from Mini but remain part of BMW Group Canada.

It’s not cute, it’s manly
Standing out from the crowd was never going to be a challenge for Mini. With its compact body, wide-eyed headlights and smiling grill, it simply doesn’t look like other cars. And, of course, who could forget its U.K. pedigree as an iconic vehicle of the 1960s? Shortly before the new model launched, a panel of automotive experts voted Mini the second most influential car of the 20th century.

But would the Mini be manly enough for modern guys?

“[A] big challenge was making sure that the Mini brand came across in a masculine way and became perceived as a male vehicle – cool, cheeky, exciting – as opposed to cute and lovable,” Shaver says, suggesting that while women will buy a car they perceive as masculine, men won’t buy a car they perceive as feminine.

So, the Mini was only released as a manual-transmission model at first, Shaver says, while the creative also went a long way to reach men. Timer boards installed above men’s room urinals in 2007 invited guys to compare their speed with that of the Mini, with ad copy chiding, “You’re a little slow out of the gate, aren’t you?”

The Mini big-bang theory
As a niche brand, it’s been critical for Mini to make a big splash without spending too much. “We don’t have a huge budget, so we try to get more attention by doing things that haven’t been done before,” Martin says.

One of his favourite executions was “Let there be Xenon” in 2007. To promote the new model and its more powerful bi-Xenon headlights, Taxi once again mounted a car to the side of a building, adding a new twist. Its headlights were pointed toward the sky, with 2,500-watt lights shooting up to the lower levels of the stratosphere. The light show was so eye-catching that the agency eventually had to take it down because it was distracting pilots.

Since often the budget is limited to one piece, Martin says they try to come up with stunts so unexpected that they generate buzz in blogs and international magazines. In 2003, Mini capitalized on the Toronto Auto Show by placing a car in a cage in the parking lot across the street, with a sign that read “Please do not feed, tease, or annoy the Mini” – a stunt that was later recreated in B.C., the U.S. and parts of Europe.

Sometimes the stunts were considerably cheaper, like “Hands Up,” which saw a new convertible Mini driven around Toronto with fake arms emerging from the driver’s side, simulating the way people instinctively put their arms up while riding a rollercoaster.

“We put that whole stunt together for about $67,” says Martin, who built the prototype in his garage. The idea was shown off at a global brand summit and ended up being used in seven countries. “I’ve got all this footage of people in Tokyo and different parts of the world doing the stunt we did here in Toronto,” he says.

Rooting for the underdog
Although Mini is a BMW brand, it’s positioned itself as the market’s scrappy underdog. When it first launched, Volkswagen was running its “Drivers wanted” campaign, so Mini bought a billboard next to VW’s that read “Real drivers wanted.” It took a swipe at another premium brand with its “Parks faster than a Ferrari” ads that same year.

But what generated the most talk value was probably its 2003 “Cops hide here” campaign, which saw billboards placed beside notorious speed traps with giant arrows pointing to police hiding spots.

“At the time, the radio stations went crazy with it – Mini fighting for the little guy, trying to bust the things that are slowing it down,” Martin says. “People in Canada see Mini as a little car looking to have some fun and get into trouble.”

Embracing the f-word: fun
“Mini is a brand that’s fun, irreverent and bold, and that brand strategy is echoed in all of its communication touchpoints,” says Kelly. His agency, Level5, compares brands by plotting them on a map of different attributes, and as far as Kelly is concerned, Mini falls squarely in the fun zone, sharing many characteristics with consumer electronics favourite Apple.

“Apple is a brand that’s entertaining, fun, desirable and interesting, and it fires on all the right emotions in terms of love and devotion, but it’s in this fun zone,” he says.

The car brand’s focus on customization and unique add-ons – from paint colours and racing stripes to branded luggage that fits perfectly in the trunk – also falls in line with Apple’s individualistic messaging, Kelly says. Not to mention the smartphone integration system built into the front display of newer models, with accompanying Mini Connected App, which gives easy access to social media.

“People often personify themselves by the car they drive, just like they personify themselves by the smartphone they carry,” he says. “I think the successful people within the automotive category have figured out that it’s this wonderful combination of rational and emotional, with emotional probably trumping rational.”

For a pocket-sized performance vehicle, fun is an apt descriptor, and Mini’s advertising has always driven this message home. A 2004 magazine ad featured a paper model of a Mini that could be folded and glued together to become a 3D replica. Another magazine execution in 2007 turned a business reply card into a faux ramp, so it looked like the Mini in the print ad would drive right off the page and into the air.

The road ahead
Since the redesigned Mini’s launch in 2002, the small car market has exploded, with competitors ranging from the next-generation Smart Fortwo to Toyota’s micro-subcompact Scion iQ.

“The world is becoming ever more mini,” Shaver says, quoting a colleague. But this is both a blessing and a curse for the brand.

“People are moving towards smaller cars, but a lot of the brands introducing those smaller cars are also looking at the way that Mini marketed [itself] and appear to be trying to follow a very similar route,” he says. “As a result, it becomes increasingly difficult to get our voice out there.”

Maintaining a consistent tone – in other words, staying true to the brand’s spunky, shit-disturber image – is one way Shaver thinks Mini will maintain its growth despite the increased competition. But it’s going to be a delicate balance, as Mini expands its offerings to attract new buyers.

When the five-door, SUV-style Mini Countryman launched last year, it presented a way to target buyers who’d grown out of their Minis with the arrival of a baby or dog, as well as folks who’d never considered buying one before. It also marked the first time Mini Canada strongly targeted families, partnering with parenting site YummyMummyClub.ca to showcase the SUV’s features in a real-life family setting.

But as the Toronto Star asked at the time, “How much larger can a Mini get before it stops being a Mini?” And how will such additions affect the brand’s identity?

“As soon as you stray from the core of your brand into other things, you risk diluting that core,” says brand advisor Kelly. “I think it’s very important, as they try to reach new markets or follow their users as they get older, [not to] stray from the core DNA. Maybe you just launch a new brand to do that instead.”

Although it’s a big leap from urinal advertising to YummyMummyClub.ca, Shaver says Mini’s historically spunky voice won’t be toned down too much.

“For us now,” says Martin, “it’s going to be telling a slightly different story, but maintaining the Mini brand and making sure it still feels like the Mini family.”

While some ads for the Countryman have referenced family reunions or joked that “Now you don’t have to sell the kids,” others used lines like “Add inches to your cockpit” and “Bigger, for your pleasure.” So while Mini may be growing up, it certainly isn’t maturing.

Strategy - Melinda Mattos

Check out the video on adweek

Fika is the Swedish word for coffee break apparently and it’s the theme of this new ad, featuring naughty-but-nice spokesman Johan, for Gevalia coffee from brand owner Kraft and current agency of the moment Taxi New York (a month ago it was Droga5 but things happen quickly at the once sleepy food and snacks company these days).

Last year Kraft fell out with Starbucks which it used to sell to supermarkets. Swedish brand Gevalia is its planned premium coffee replacement.

Yesterday we looked at Taxi’s campaign for another big Kraft launch, MiO energy drink additive. Taxi, founded in Toronto 20 years ago by Paul Lavoie and Jane Hope, was bought by WPP last year and aligned with the Y&R network.

Since then its Amsterdam office has gained a place on the VW roster and New York won the bulk of Revlon’s $260m account, formerly handled in-house. Now it’s going great guns for Kraft.

At this rate WPP will renaming the mighty Y&R (as Young & Rubicam it was the biggest agency in the US for many years) Taxi Y&R.

More About Advertising - Angie Dean

McCain Foods has launched an online promotion that offers consumers free online movie streaming with the purchase of the company’s frozen pizza products.

The program soft-launched in December with the introduction of a website, McCainMovies.ca, where visitors can enter a PIN code from packages of McCain’s Rising Crust and Thin Crust pizza. Once the code has been entered, visitors can select from a library of Warner Bros. movies to stream within the following 48 hours.

“Pizza is a pretty price-competitive category and we wanted to give consumers a little something extra,” said Paul Gallagher, director of marketing at McCain Foods. “A movie download, which would have a value of about four dollars, is a really compelling value-add for the price point you can get a pizza at.

“The other consumer insight would be this idea that McCain is giving you all the ingredients for a great family night. It’s kind of like your whole night provided by McCain.”

McCain launched English and French television spots, developed by Toronto-based agency Taxi, to support the promotion last month. The spot depicts a mother taking a McCain pizza from her kitchen to her living room, where she sits strategically on a couch between her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend as they all prepare to watch a movie.

The website and back-end technology for the promotion was developed by Silicon Valley firm Hip Digital Media, which also handled licensing of the Warner Bros. film content.

Baris Karadogan, chief executive officer at Hip Digital Media, said digital content giveaways such as McCain’s movie promotion benefit both content creators and brands.

“For Warner Bros., this is a whole new channel for content and a way to get content in the hands of people. People buy content and people steal content, so why not have a model where a brand pays for the content and the consumer gets it for free?” said Karadogan. “For brands, it’s a fantastic way to increase sales without giving coupons and discounts.”

Toronto’s Capital C created special packaging for the promotion, which will continue into March.

Matt Semansky - Marketing Magazine

Ad of the Day: MiO

The makeover of wild animals into twentysomething “Millanimals” in Taxi’s first ad for Kraft’s MiO Energy water flavoring is a bit off-putting at first. That’s probably because the animated cheetah, rhino and gazelle feel more like dudes than animals when dressed, groomed and gelled. Doesn’t take long, though, to get sucked into the bar they inhabit.

Called—appropriately enough—The Watering Hole, the space feels like a less freakish and more suburban version of the famous cantina in Stars Wars (seen, of course, most recently as the coda in Volkswagen’s latest Super Bowl ad). Instead of liquor bottles, clear water bottles line a shelf behind Rhino, a muscular guy with glasses who wears a tight T-shirt that says, “Animal.” Naturally, there’s product placement: bottles of MiO on tables and in the hands of characters, a neon MiO sign on the wall, even MiO coasters. The sign and coasters are subtle, though, and blend into the surroundings.

As guitar-driven rock plays in the background, Cheetah, in a black leather jacket, grouses to Rhino that “this MiO Energy is completely crushing my game.” Cheetah further explains that “everyone is more energized, more alert” after they mix the stuff into their water. As a result, he’s no longer the fastest beast around.

“Remember when I used to be it?” Cheetah continues, almost crying into his clear glass of water. “I was the man. If you needed to track a gazelle down for dinner, you came to me.” The ad closes with Gazelle, dressed in a jean jacket, literally laughing in his face.

“Cheetah” is the first of series of :30s and :15s that begin to roll out today. Look for a giraffe mixing it up with a loris in a future spot. (The animals are reminiscent of the Orangina beasts in Fred & Farid’s work for that brand.) The campaign also includes print and online ads and a presence on MiO’s Facebook page. The tagline is, “MiO. Shake things up.”

Gevalia coffee is getting in touch with its inner Swede.

Taxi this week launched a major ad campaign for the Swedish brand that centers around “Johan,” a suave, well-dressed character with Brad Pitt-like hair. He’s the European alternative to “Joe”—as in an American cup of Joe—and personifies a coffee that’s worth taking the time to savor and sip from a china cup.

The push began with an online video in which Johan talks lovingly about the Swedish lifestyle of swimming in arctic waters, special massages and “taking time out to enjoy ourselves with fika.” Without explaining that fika means coffee break in Swedish, Johan implies something more suggestive, recalling the details of his “first fika.”

“I was 17. It was on the kitchen counter with my au pair. Didn’t last very long,” he says, before pausing a few seconds to contemplate the memory and then filling in the blanks for the viewer.

The campaign, backed by an estimated $30-40 million in media spending, also includes TV, Web banners and a presence on Facebook. The broad push coincides with the coffee’s crossover from a mail-order brand to one now sold in grocery stores.

Brand parent Kraft Foods has a lot riding on the effort, given that Gevalia is meant to replace Starbucks as its premium coffee brand at retail. Kraft previously distributed Starbucks at supermarkets, but the two are in the midst of a lengthy divorce. “Cup of Johan” represents Taxi New York’s first work for Kraft since joining the company’s agency roster last year.

The Swedish character was born of the challenge of distinguishing a premium coffee in a crowded marketplace. Or as Kraft’s Kim Bealle put it: “What would be interesting to people about the 13th or 14th brand out there?”

Johan also was designed to connect with the brand’s core sales target of women 35-45. Bealle described him as “appealing” and “a little bit seductive, but he stays on the right side of it.”

Finding an actor who fit the bill wasn’t easy, according to Dave Clemans, executive creative director at Taxi. The search took a few months, even after the agency cast a wide net in America, Europe and, of course, Sweden.

The key was “getting that right tone,” Clemans said. “He wants to please these women. He wants to make them happy. He’s coming from Sweden; he knows how wonderful it can be and he wants to bring it to them. It’s all about exciting them and making their life better.”

Expect to see Johan on talk shows as well, as part of Kraft’s push for media exposure for Gevalia.

The campaign is expected to run throughout the year.

ADWEEK - Andrew McMains

If you are one of those people who would prefer to do their cooking while avoiding the kitchen (like the guys featured in the above ad) then Boston Pizza’s got a treat for you. Working with Taxi, it developed a book for the finger cook: The Joy of Finger Cooking. Of course, it’s really a new take on the standard delivery takeout menu, but that’s a distinction that finger cooks are happy not to make. Speed dial, after all, is the finger cook’s most important cooking tool. The cookbook is available for download via Boston Pizza’s website, which it has recently revamped to enable online ordering with fewer clicks.

Kraft Canada is inviting consumers to enter its Facebook battle zone to participate in a series of challenges as part of a larger marketing campaign for its Kraft Dinner brand.
The effort launched Jan. 9 with a television commercial driving viewers to the KD Facebook page where they can learn more about the first challenge, called KD Bombing.

The challenge is a playful take on photo bombing, which is the art of ruining other people’s photos, and quickly overtaking planking as the latest craze.

“It ties into what our consumers are playing with online,” said Jordan Fietje, senior brand manager at Kraft Dinner, referring to the number of these pictures that end up online.

For the challenge, consumers are asked to upload a photo that includes Kraft Dinner (in the box or in a bowl) in an unexpected way.

For instance, one submission on the site shows a man who appears to be taking a nap on the beach, with someone in the background holding a box of KD.

There are five challenges in all, each running for two weeks. At the end of each challenge, the top three photos with the most votes will be highlighted on the site. Rather than a prize, the three “winners” walk away with “infinite bragging rights.”

As of Friday the number of KD Facebook fans had increased by 8,000 to just over 128,000 members, said Fietje.

“I hope it will pick up even more than that, but it’s a good sign,” he said. “It shows how much love these consumers already have for Kraft Dinner and they’re chopping at the bit to start talking about it with a program like this.”

A video on the Facebook page explains how the challenge works, and features the same two twenty-something males who appear in the television commercial.

Following the “challenge” theme, the two men in the ad are seen trying to get the other’s bowl of Kraft Dinner. Their witty banter matches up nicely with the spirit of the KD brand, said Fietje. A second television commercial is expected to launch in the coming weeks.

Taxi 2 developed the television commercials and Facebook portion of the campaign, while MediaVest handled the media buy.

Marketing Magazine - Kristin Laird

Koodo is going the distance for consumers with an online contest that rewards users for the amount of kilometers between them and their Canadian Facebook friends.

Uncle Joe in the Northwest Territories is starting to look pretty good right about now.

Aptly named “Friends with Benefits,” the game allows players to accumulate kilometers between friends within Canada in order to win prizes, which includes a tip for two to anywhere in the country, as well as a cash, mobile phones and gift cards. And while the tab will calculate the amount of friends you have in distant places, it will only officially count the kilometers if the friend has also signed up to play the game. The contest will continue to run until Feb. 16. The creative was handled by Taxi 2 and the media planning was led by Cossette.

“Koodo has a Canada-wide plan that gets rid of long-distance and roaming charges within the country, so we wanted a way to get people talking about that,” says Lance Martin, executive creative director, Taxi 2, on the reasons behind launching the game.

“I like the fact that [the contest] involves game play by interacting with the real world,” he says. “This isn’t exactly a hard sell. We’re so confident in our plans that we don’t really have to hit you over the head with them.”

With a taste for neon and a buff wrestler as its spokesperson, Koodo will traditionally advertise itself on billboards, in commercials and within malls, says Martin. But for this particular initiative, Koodo decided to fasten its digital hold with the placement of ads on a variety of entertainment and travel sites directing its target audience of 18- to 24-year-olds to its Facebook page and instructional YouTube video.

The contest went live on Friday, and before any advertising launched, it already received over 5,000 registered players, says Martin.

Strategy Magazine - Jennifer Horn

Canadian Tire has launched a new TV spot that throws stones at the confinements of winter in an effort to show Canadians that it is a one-stop fitness destination, providing solutions to stay in shape even when the weather is not ideal, says Cindy Graham, manager, strategic marketing, Canadian Tire.

The commercial, which highlights Canadian Tire‘s recently launched line of home fitness products, Livestrong, developed by Johnson Health Tech in association with the Lance Armstrong foundation, features a woman about to set out for a jog, but ends up walking into a wall of snow as she exits his house.

The TV spot and accompanying digital ads were created by Taxi and planned by MediaCom Canada, and will run for the next three weeks. The commercial will air on channels and networks including BBC Canada, CMT network, National Geographic Channel, CTV News, Discovery Network and the Food Network. The online banner ads will be placed on pages featuring health and sports content on Yahoo! and Sympatico.

Two of the digital banners promote the cardio equipment and Livestrong products, and one creates awareness of the brand’s growing female-skewed fitness equipment such as yoga mats, kettle bells and boxing gloves, says Graham.

“Our target audience for this campaign is Canadian families interested in establishing or maintaining an active lifestyle, and we know that a lot of customers depend on online research to aid purchasing decisions related to fitness equipment,” she adds.

As an added component to the promotion of the new product line, signage featuring a QR code that directs consumers to an inspirational YouTube video on the Livestrong brand has been placed in-store, says Graham.

Strategy Magazine - Jennifer Horn

Jellyfish floating in water to the celebratory tune of Carol of the Bells; an electric eel powering a Christmas tree with Jingle Bells playing in the background. This describes some of the new TV and radio spots launched this week by Taxi Vancouver for the Vancouver Aquarium.

With the mandate to promote the exhibit “Luminescence: A celebration of aquatic light,” the spots feature anemones, jellyfish and other kinds of bioluminescent – i.e. light-up – sea life in what Taxi Creative director Matt Bielby calls “the aquatic version of fireflies.”

The campaign is part of the aquarium’s new brand platform, “Imagine yourself in our world.”

Joanne Turner, marketing consultant at the Vancouver Aquarium, said in a statement that the holiday-themed campaign is “an impactful, simple idea that is spot-on with our brand and executed beautifully in every format – from the identity to the street banners to the print ad to the radio spot and finally TV.”

“The campaign marks a new holiday tradition that the aquarium is planning on making an annual event,” Bielby said.

Marketing Magazine - Evra Taylor

Rocky Mountain is one of two new Taxi clients in Western Canada

Rocky Mountain Dealerships has tapped Taxi‘s Calgary office to oversee a complete brand makeover and communicate its new corporate image to both customers and employees.

Rocky Mountain, a large Calgary-based agricultural and construction equipment dealership, needed a new brand following the merger of several smaller corporate entities. Taxi is the company’s first ever AOR.

“We had 37 branches in Western Canada operating under three separate names,” said Laird Munro, Rocky Mountain’s general manager of marketing. “We needed a brand that would leverage the power of those branches and the size and history of the company.”

Ben Tarr, business development manager for Taxi West, said the Rocky Mountain account is a “mammoth” win for the agency’s Calgary shop. “It is now our biggest piece of business there. We are starting from scratch and expect to roll out a brand campaign by mid-2012.” This will include an overhaul of the look and feel of the retail outlets, including point of sale materials and signage.

Munro said Taxi was chosen to steer the re-branding because his company is starting from scratch with its image. “There are lots of agencies who can re-work a brand, but when it comes to conceptualizing a new brand and making it visible in the marketplace, Taxi is head and shoulders above everybody else.”

Taxi’s branding expertise won them another account recently; its Vancouver office is developing a new brand strategy and positioning for local food manufacturer Golden Boy Foods.

The family-run company was acquired by Tricor Pacific Capital in 2007, explained Chris Zawada, senior designer for Taxi Vancouver, and “to create the new identity, we immersed ourselves in the business, hairnets and all, to understand the internal culture and determine how it had changed” after that acquisition.

The resulting brand rollout included a new logo, tagline, signage, vehicles and a packaging system.

Marketing Magazine - Norma Ramage

Canadian Tire

The retailing icon may be facing tough new competition from the U.S., but in 2011 Canadian Tire challenged them to “bring it on”

The brand masters at Canadian Tire spent 2011 making an iconic brand top of mind again. It started with “Bring It On,” a new tagline aimed at positioning Canadian Tire as the place to help Canadians with the little jobs and joys of the seasons, from winterizing the car and clearing snow from the driveway to bike-riding and fertilizing the lawn.

Rob Shields, senior vice-president of marketing and customer for Canadian Tire, says the bold positioning aims to distinguish his company from increasing competition, including the imminent arrival of U.S.-based retailer Target. “We are up against Walmart, Home Depot, Active Green + Ross—you name it, depending on the department, we have a different competitive set,” he says. “We needed a unique point of difference.”

The beauty is in how Canadian Tire has communicated that point of difference, which Shields credits for raising such key performance indicators as brand recall and likelihood to recommend. The retailer has significantly reduced its TV advertising spend, with 26 spots produced this year versus 46 in 2007. Instead, more marketing dollars have been devoted to fully integrated campaigns with strong online components, guerrilla-style advertising tactics, and PR.

“It is not easy to change your image when you’re an iconic brand because people think they know you,” says Maureen Atkinson, senior partner at retail consultancy J.C. Williams Group. “They have done a good job of reaching out and becoming more relevant to Canadians.”

One way Canadian Tire has connected is through the “House of Innovation” program, in which it bought a suburban Toronto home in need of a little TLC. Online, the company posts videos of how it made improvements to the house using store products—72 have been shot so far. Shields calls the campaign Canadian Tire’s most integrated to date, leveraging everything from its weekly flyer to a homepage takeover of YouTube.

“An idea like that—which is really outside a client’s comfort zone—takes a lot of work,” says Steve Mykolyn, chief creative officer at Taxi, Canadian Tire’s agency of record. “But they weren’t afraid to take a leap of faith.”

Marketing Magazine - Chris Daniels

For 10 years, Taxi has consistently been on top of the ad game, racking up awards, big clients, new offices and off-the-charts growth. Now it’s poised for the next leg of the journey.

It’s been a big decade for the agency that Paul Lavoie and Jane Hope started as a small office in Montreal in 1992. So it seems fitting that Taxi should end 2010 with some big news. By now it’s common industry knowledge that it’s been acquired by global holding company WPP and is now part of the Young & Rubicam Brands portfolio.

But rather than signal the end of an era for the agency, the deal can be seen as the beginning of its next evolution – Taxi won’t be changing its name, management or famous attitude any time soon.

“I sold the company, I didn’t sell the brand,” says Lavoie, noting that the acquisition will allow Taxi to have access to more services like CRM and PR, and will help the agency grow even further globally.

According to Peter Stringham, chairman and CEO of Y&R Brands, it’s the Taxi attitude that makes it a great fit within Y&R. “In 1923, [Raymond Rubicam] wrote the phrase ‘resist the usual’ as a mission statement for the agency,” he says. “Be original, be innovative, whatever people are doing in the marketplace, do it differently. Paul also really believes in challenging convention and talks about doubt.”

This past decade has seen the agency spread its roots across the country and internationally. In 2004, Taxi opened a New York office, and while some big U.S. agencies couldn’t cut it in the big apple, Taxi continues to thrive. In 2006, Taxi 2 opened in Toronto, as well as a Calgary office. That year the agency experienced 49% year-over-year growth. The following year, a Vancouver office was opened, and Taxi’s top-line growth was 50%. In fact, it’s grown financially year-over-year, every year for the latter half of the decade despite the recession. The most recent expansion has taken the agency overseas to Amsterdam in May 2009.

CEO Rob Guenette, who joined the agency in 1998, notes that the key to successful expansion has been to be smart about cash flow and never put the base operations at risk. “To facilitate that foundation, we kept the backroom in Toronto,” he says. “So when we opened Taxi 2, Vancouver and Calgary, we didn’t burden those offices with extra costs, we centralized the cost and had one system – one gigantic P&L. It wasn’t a dog-eat-dog environment.”

While risk is always calculated, Taxi has never been afraid to dive in head-first, whether it be expanding into new markets or taking on clients that come with big challenges – as proven with one if its crowning campaign achievements of the past decade. In 2002, a TV spot aired featuring a man skipping to work to a happy tune. Viewers didn’t know why he was so happy until the spot ended without a word spoken, just a super that said “Viagra.”

“Viagra is probably the one campaign that the global creative community associates with Taxi,” says CCO Steve Mykolyn, noting that wherever he is – whether it’s Cannes or the Czech Republic – he just has to mention Viagra and people automatically know Taxi.

To make a pharmaceutical campaign clever, sexy and even fun is one thing. To make it those things under intense restrictions is another – it was a solution to draconian DTC regulations that heavily restricted product information. The campaign has since become ingrained in pop culture, and has spawned various other Viagra campaigns, all using humour to get the message across.

Among the agency’s other prized campaigns is the consistent (and consistently cute) work for Telus. For over a decade, Taxi has introduced countless critters to the Telus roster, with the result being an easily recognizable brand identity that stands out from the highly competitive pack.

Telus reflects a source of pride for Guenette and the agency – keeping clients. “I think the reason why we’ve had this amazing client retention is because we have one foot in the present and one in the future,” he says. “We act as much as possible as brand stewards and strategic partners, so without that kind of vision we wouldn’t have such great client retention.”

Taxi’s work for Telus also led the company to have enough faith in the agency to entrust it with the brand identity and launch of Koodo in 2008, which became instantly recognizable at warp speed, and which was recently named one of strategy’s Brands of the Year for 2010.

Taxi seems to have a magic touch when it comes to launches. It launched BMW’s Mini in Canada in 2001 and its work for the brand has since been consistently awarded locally and internationally, and picked up around the world.

A more personal source of Taxi pride is the 15 Below project, launched in 2007 to celebrate Taxi’s 15th anniversary. Mykolyn led the creation of a jacket that could be stuffed with newspaper to achieve various levels of warmth, or folded up into a pillow, and handed them out to the homeless to keep them warm in the winter. All the Taxi offices participated in the year-long project, which distributed about 3,000 coats.

“It reflects our philosophy that we love to do work that gives back to the community and is socially responsible,” says Mykolyn, also noting Taxi’s work with Toronto-based youth shelter Covenant House, for which Guenette is a board member (as was Lavoie before he moved to New York).

The notable work, often humorous, could stretch on for pages – for WestJet, Reitmans, Reversa, Dairy Farmers of Canada, and the list goes on. Taxi’s enviable track record has been duly noted by international and home turf juries; it’s been amongst the top three most awarded agencies in Canada, according to strategy’s Creative Report Card, every year since 2001 (in 2000 it ranked fourth). And it has been amongst strategy’s Agency of the Year top three a total of nine out of 10 years, including five Golds. Overall, in the last decade, the agency has won roughly 1,200 national and international awards (2,000 including shortlist/finalist positions).

Taxi was also named one of the 50 best managed companies by Deloitte each year from 2003 to 2007.

“The work has been consistent through the decade, but more telling, it’s been consistent through periods of extreme growth,” says Guenette. “A lot of people, through extreme growth, lose their way, and I’m proud of the fact that we’re still Taxi in every sense of the word.”

Part of being Taxi is a work culture that caps each office at 150 people maximum (hence the opening of Taxi 2 when the Toronto office reached capacity). Guenette says that without that rule in place, “I’m not sure our work would be that diverse, I’m not sure that we’d have a strong succession plan [or] our client base would be quite as diverse.”

Lance Martin, ECD at Taxi 2, coincidentally celebrates his 10th anniversary with the agency this year. He carried the Taxi work ethic – which involves a lot of collaboration and leaving egos at the door – with him when they opened the second Toronto office. “There’s really no politics here,” he says. “The only thing that holds you back at Taxi is whether or not you can think of the idea.”

Guenette notes, with pride, that Taxi is a hard place to work. “I always tell people, the standards are really high, so if you’re not part of that, you’re not part of Taxi…It’s an intense place. It’s not personal, this is about building a better company, this is about doing the right work for our brands and creative standards. People who gravitate to that love the intensity. People who shit their trousers should go work someone else. This is not a place for timid people.”

Adds Mykolyn: “Rob’s famous – he sets goals, and if we meet them, he sets new ones.”

In another 10 years, Lavoie wants Taxi to be known as the “biggest little agency in the world” – big ideas, within a culture of staying small and agile. “A bus leaves at a certain hour and you have to wait for it. A taxi – you can call it up and get there.” 

The Book of Doubt

Taxi has written the book on doubting convention – literally. On Dec. 13, Doubt: Unconventional Wisdom from the World’s Greatest Shit Disturber hits bookstores. Told from the perspective of a little character named Doubt, the book presents 12 insights into using doubt as a catalyst for change. The insights are backed by stories about 40 “Disciples of Doubt” (the Sony Walkman, for example), imparting wisdom in 250 words or less. Illustrated by Gary Taxali, the book features a QR code that drives to Doubttheconventional.com, where readers can submit their own “doubtful” stories.

“It this book fails to disturb its readers, its authors will be deeply disappointed. Only the most blinkered traditionalist will fail to benefit,” says Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP, in praise of the book.

Strategy Magazine
-Emily Wexler

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