Lowe Roche: The teaching agency
“Wickedly smart. That’s how I would describe the agency. We aspire to be wickedly smart – strategically, creatively, anyway possible,” says Lowe Roche CEO, Monica Ruffo. “Lowe Roche has always had an amazing creative reputation but today we also have a strong strategic reputation and that has been recognized through awards across multiple categories.”
The agency structure, a completely integrated mash up of expertise, is part of its success across disciplines and categories. “I am proud of the fact we’re just as strong strategically as we are creatively. We have expert leaders in different disciplines but everyone sits altogether, not segregated by discipline,” says Ruffo. “They’re not in silos, no set up departments.”
Another point of difference is the fact that the agency has hired the staff it needed to completely integrate its French services including account management, strategy and creative so that French is simultaneous with English, never an after-thought and more cost effective for clients.
Ruffo says, “We also define ourselves as a teaching agency, much like there are teaching hospitals. We believe we all have a lot to learn, top down, bottom up and peer to peer. There’s informal training on an ongoing basis and we also have a lot of formal training. We spend a lot against it and put our money where our mouth is.”
Lowe Roche opened its doors in 1991 with a simple principle aimed at working its hardest at putting as much of the client’s fee as possible towards solving business problems and driving results. Today the agency is strong across a broad range of disciplines including strategic and communications planning, digital and social media, online and traditional advertising – and has the awards to prove it. So far this year Lowe Roche has won several awards including a Cassie, a Webby and at the David Ogilvy Awards, which gave a nod to Lowe’s research effectiveness on two-year campaigns for Groupe Media TFO, Johnson & Johnson and the Heart & Stroke Foundation. The agency also won a health Effie this year.
The bronze Cassie was for year-two of the Heart & Stroke Foundation’s ‘Make Health Last’ campaign. After making Canadian Baby Boomers aware of the realities of the disease, the second year was designed to inspire them to make daily, healthy behaviour changes through mass media, including :30 and :60 TV, radio, print, media integration partnerships, and OOH.
The Webby recognized the awareness campaign for Missing Children’s Network ‘Missing Kids Stamps,’ customized stamps featuring the faces of missing kids. At the website missingkidsstamps.ca, people chose an image of a child and then were linked to the Canada Post site to order the stamps.
Lowe Roche’s client roster also includes Becel, J. Crew, Phoenix AMD International, Treasury Wine Estates, Alimentation Couche-Tard, Johnson Insurance, Warner Bros. Canada, KPMG and Nestle Purina PetCare Canada. This year, the agency added the Canadian Kennel Club Foundation, the Canadian Cancer Society and InteraXon, the tech company that created the Muse brain-sensing headband.
“We have developed a pretty strong expertise in health and wellness overall. Some of it is related to causes – whether Heart & Stroke Foundation, Arthritis Research Foundation, or Canadian Cancer Society, but also our work with Becel and now InteraXon, both of which are in the broader health and wellness category,” Ruffo says. “That understanding of the consumer and the trigger points for changing behaviour within health and wellness is something we’re honing.”
Ruffo explains that Lowe Roche’s process is simple: it just puts the right group of people together to work on a business problem. “We don’t see how you can work in a way that isn’t completely integrated in today’s world. That’s how you come up with brilliant ideas.”
See Lowe Roche highlighted in last year’s sponsored supplement “The Escalating Value of Creativity”
