Veteran ad man Paul Pearson has been lured out of retirement and back to the agency business to head up the Toyota Canada car and dealer accounts at Toronto-based Saatchi & Saatchi.
He replaces Brad Fogel, who resigned last month to take a senior position with Hal Riney & Partners in San Francisco, Calif.
Pearson had been operating his own Toronto-area Toyota dealership until last fall when he sold his business and retired.
For the last seven years, he had kept his hand in the advertising business as president of the Toronto-area dealer association, which uses Saatchi as its agency.
Pearson says he gained a lot of insight into the ad business working with an agency from the client side.
He says if he were to assess some of the recommendations he made while he worked on car accounts such as Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz and Fiat, he is certain he would find some of them naive, because agencies and clients tend to approach a problem from different perspectives.
‘I’ve been talking to a couple of people here,’ says Pearson, ‘saying I’m going to get them on a showroom floor to experience what selling a car is all about.
‘Because, until you’ve experienced it, felt it and really know what the process is all about, you can’t imagine what it is.’
Pearson began his career with Ogilvy & Mather Canada and held positions with the network in Australia and New York. When the agency bought a shop in Singapore, he became managing director there for nearly five years.
When he returned to Canada, he spent a year with McCann-Erickson and ended up as a partner in Straiton Pearson Martin Holman.
The Toronto agency, which had Hyundai on its client roster, operated for more than a dozen years. About 10 years ago, the shop was sold to Saatchi & Saatchi which then rolled it into Bates Canada (then Backer Spielvogel Bates).
Pearson is getting his feet wet on the Toyota business at the busiest time of the year, the new model season, during which Toyota is launching a redesigned and re-engineered Camry.
Advertising for Camry and the rest of the lineup is intended to shed the carmaker’s conservative image and show the younger, hipper side of Toyota.
Toyota is building on the image it portrayed in its Paseo and Tercel Sport car advertising earlier this year, which itself followed the success of the ‘Ties’ campaign launched by Dentsu Cadence, the Toyota truck creative agency.
