Strategy Sponsored Supplement

Lowe Roche

Innovate Or Die

At Lowe Roche, innovate or die is not just a motto, it’s the best way to deliver results.

“Innovate or die has been our creative philosophy at Lowe Roche for a long time. It’s also a good answer to the question of what it takes to survive in this business,” says Jane Murray, co-creative director. “It’s how we look at everything, the philosophy we live by for all our clients, and that flows down through the agency as well.”

Monica Ruffo, Lowe Roche CEO, believes that creative genius lives at the intersection of people, not with an individual. “Great ideas aren’t born in the heads of the creative department people, they’re born at the intersection of the creative team, strategic planners, the account people and there could be a client there as well. That’s where greatness comes from and so everything we do is built around that. There is a great deal of collaboration here within Lowe Roche and with our clients as well. More and more our processes are including the clients so that they’re part of that creativity too.”

No matter the size of the client, Lowe Roche puts the same passion, the same approach, same philosophy and same thinking to work. That passion is evident in its work for the Purina brand and PawsWay, an event centre owned by Purina dedicated to celebrating pets and their owners with exhibits, activities, and everything around the love for pets – and it’s all free for anyone to visit.

Mark Mason, co-creative director, says the challenge for Lowe Roche was to find a way to convey Purina’s dedication to bringing pets and people closer together. Through PawsWay, the agency came up with a way to do that and to also promote and develop Toronto as a pet-friendly city.

Mason says, “The first step was to gain engagement, so we focused on retailers as a key gateway to pet acceptance. We asked them to declare their stores and businesses pet-friendly via a sticker in the window, which gains them more customers. Then, we also found a way to encourage loyalty to PawsWay by asking pet owners to sign up at PawsWay.ca to get perks at those businesses, and more.

“By getting business owners to join this first-of-its-kind initiative, customers win by gaining more places they can go with their pets and we send a strong statement from Purina and PawsWay about the importance of pets in our lives.”

In another campaign, Lowe Roche proves that the best solution for raising awareness for the client isn’t always advertising. It can be a stamp.

In May for Missing Children’s Month, Lowe Roche and the Missing Children’s Network launched missingkidstamps.ca. With a goal of getting the faces of missing children into as many hands as possible, the agency realized that stamps, by their very nature, get into the homes of Canadians every single day. Out of that came the idea of putting the faces of missing children on real Canadian postage stamps. A website was developed where people can choose a missing child, create a stamp, and then purchase domestic, US or international stamps from Canada Post.

Buying Missing Kids Stamps is a powerful way to honour missing children – and ultimately, help bring them home.
Lowe Roche demonstrates that it doesn’t matter who the client is, if they’re open to great work, you can do work that wins awards and gets the results they’re looking for.