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Grey Canada

Famously Effective

Some agencies view success as creating high profile work known for breakthrough creativity while others consider it to be all about generating advertising that effectively delivers results. Grey Canada believes it is possible to do both. ‘Famously Effective’ is the agency’s tagline and the thinking that drives Grey to develop and evaluate its work based on its ability to deliver both attributes equally.

Stephanie Nerlich, Grey’s president and CEO, explains that the agency develops its creative ideas by following a simple but important philosophy: People-strong.

“For us this means embracing creative contributions from every person and facet of the organization to really rally around the business problem we are trying to solve. We are looking at creativity beyond simply advertising ideas but also ideas we can find in technology, user experience, retail store design and product development,” says Nerlich.

“As one of the only agencies that has produced Cannes-winning campaigns across multiple categories – traditional mass, radio and press, media, direct, cyber and mobile – in the last couple of years, we’re pretty convinced this philosophy is working.” She says that it’s impossible to succeed without taking a few risks, so Grey rewards failure with an ‘heroic failure’ award that is handed out once a quarter to the individuals who are brave enough to try new things.

Another way Grey fosters creativity is with an office layout that Nerlich describes as “one giant organized chaos” that makes collaboration across disciplines business as usual. It is open concept to the nth degree. There are no department silos, no partitions – just workspaces.

Nerlich says, “The digital world changed our ability to be that structured. Creative teams are no longer just an art director and copywriter. We’ve had to become much more flexible creatively as there are so many more ways to solve a problem. You need more brains on it.”

The ‘Most Valuable Social Network’ campaign for the Missing Children’s Society of Canada is a good illustration of how well this all works. It also highlights the agency’s digital chops and its ability to solve business problems in a way that goes well beyond advertising.

“The client came to us and said, ‘I need a TV ad to create awareness and drive donations’. We said, ‘no you don’t, you need to find missing kids’,” explains Nerlich. “We worked with them to understand what the real problem was, so that in the end, missing kids were saved and it drove awareness and donations beyond their expectations.”

The agency decided that traditional road signs and missing children alerts were costly and were limited in their reach so it created the world’s first-ever online search party using social media and search technology to help find missing children. The idea won Cannes Lions in both cyber and mobile categories but most importantly, it works. This tool led to the safe return of six missing children in Canada in the first year, and is a profound inspiration as to the potential impact of boundary-pushing creativity.