Rethink Toronto Hello, Toronto clients. We feel your pain.
If you’re a client trying to engage people and drive results, these are challenging times. In this age of digital and social media, you need to create content in more places than ever before. But your overall marketing budget has probably stayed the same— or even shrunk.
To reach people in all of these new channels, most traditional ad agencies aren’t up to the job. So you have a choice: Hire specialist firms in each discipline, or hire an “integrated” agency with a bunch of specialized divisions.
Either way, you end up with too many project managers, too much waste and too much in-fighting. Dealing with different companies also makes it hard for your brand to speak with one voice everywhere. Even worse, no one’s prepared to take responsibility for hard sales results.
That’s where we come in. We’ve been rethinking the agency model for 10 years, to make it more efficient, more effective and more accountable.
And now we’re in Toronto. We’d love to show you why we’re the right alternative for your business. To get started, just click the links below:
The agency rethought for the digital age
Although we still have a soft spot for vinyl records and tube amplifiers, the world we live and play in now is a digital one. So much has changed— except the ad agency business, which seems stuck firmly in the last century.
Rethink has a unique structure that makes us uniquely suited to the digital age. With us, you get all the benefits of specialized thinking in every discipline, without all the in-fighting and inefficiency.
We’ll assign one experienced account manager to your business, not 10 different people. You get a true generalist to manage projects that touch every part of your brand— from design, to digital, to TV and print.
Your account manager works with a hand-picked team of senior specialists in areas like data analysis, digital architecture, social media, communications planning, design and, of course, advertising.
The bottom line is this: You don’t need a digital agency. You need strategy, ideas and content for the digital age.
You don’t need a social media agency, you need a communications strategy that is inherently social.
Our core Toronto team
Our Toronto office is managed by a new generation of digital leaders.
Our managing partner is Pema Hegan. A New Zealand native, Pema has lived in Toronto for six years. Prior to joining Rethink, Pema founded, grew and then sold GigPark, a popular social web startup that lets members find local businesses through recommendations from their friends. GigPark was acquired by Canpages in August, 2009.
Before GigPark, Pema was an account director at Rethink in Vancouver working on Bell Canada and Canwest, so he completely understands our processes and philosophy. Prior to Rethink, he worked at a leading-edge media strategy company in London, England.
Pema’s partner in crime is Dré Labre, one of Canada’s leading creative talents. Over the past 13 years, Dré has worked on integrated campaigns for clients like Subaru, Gatorade and Clorox at agencies like Tribal DDB, Blast Radius and MacLaren McCann.
Dré has been a judge at awards shows as diverse as the CMAs and the Webbys. He routinely speaks at advertising, technology, music and filmmaking conferences.
Pema and Dré have a team of account managers in-house in Toronto. They have creative resources on the ground in T.O., plus full access to our team in Vancouver— including integrated production services and one of the largest and most celebrated creative departments in the country.
This includes national creative directors Chris Staples and Ian Grais and national managing director Tom Shepansky. Chris, Ian and Tom are in Toronto weekly— as they have been for the last decade, servicing Rethink’s many existing Toronto clients.
Welcome to our office/production studio
Our space at 110 Spadina Avenue follows the Rethink philosophy of cheap and cheerful surroundings (we’d rather spend money on senior specialists, not fancy furniture).
Our offices are also designed to help us create certain types of content quickly and efficiently. Our boardroom doubles as a photo studio. One meeting room doubles as a recording studio.
Our reception area converts into a bar to host events for Toronto’s tech and marketing communities. We designed it this way because we believe in contributing to the communities that we’re part of. It’s good karma, and it means we’re constantly learning from and connecting with interesting collaborators. (Contact Pema if you’d like to host an event.)
Rethink TO opened for business in April 2010, and the office is coming along nicely. To see some “before” shots, just click here.
Our offices are designed with room to grow— up to 20 Rethinkers at first, with adjacent space ready to lease.
A decade of results with some of Canada’s biggest brands
You might be surprised at some of the brands we’ve been working with for the past 10 years.
You might also be surprised to know that half these clients are headquartered in Toronto, including Sobeys and Bell Canada (Solo Mobile and Sympatico). We also do national work for A&W and Mr. Lube. Plus regional work for clients like Coast Capital Savings, BCAA, Playland and Science World, to name a few. (To see case studies, complete with results, click here.)
For most of these clients, we handle much more than just advertising. We’re involved in every aspect of the brand— from the customer experience in-store to the user experience online. This means being just as interested in staff uniforms and package design as banner ads and TV commercials.
Based on our obsession with results, we’ve won some nice kudos over the years, including being named Agency of the Year by both Marketing Magazine and Strategy Magazine. We’ve also been named the top-ranked creative agency by Strategy three times, with Chris and Ian as the top-ranked creative talent in the country for the past decade (for the full list, click here).
True accountability means putting profit on the line
It’s always struck us as a cop-out that agencies pass the buck when it comes to sales results. Very few have simple pay-for-performance plans.
At Rethink, we’ve always believed in real accountability. That’s why we offer the Rethink Rebate to all of our retainer clients. Once we agree on a fee, we set up to 5 percent aside to be earned based on criteria set by each client. It’s not a bonus— it’s up to a third of our profit at risk. In fact, we have more money tied up in rebates than we pay in rent each year.
Over the past decade, we’ve also embraced digital measurement and analytics to take accountability to the next step. We ask clients to set goals and agree on metrics for every initiative we create and we pride ourselves on achieving those goals.
We'd love to talk
Our Toronto office is now officially open. Contact us in complete confidence:
Pema Hegan
pe..@rethinkcanada.com
416.583.5724
twitter.com/Pema