While agencies have been observing with horror the inroads that business consultants have been making into the marketing and communications arena, Grey Canada has taken a proactive step by launching its own consultancy.

War Paint Brand Directions has been established to provide clients with the senior counsel they have been seeking from other consultants and also to address problems with a client’s most important asset, its brands.

War Paint is operating as an autonomous subsidiary of Grey Canada, although it will also function as a plug-in for Grey clients as needed.

Andy Krupski, president of Grey Canada, says War Paint’s mandate is to provide senior solution-oriented expertise to clients who no longer want to go through multiple layers of people to get it.

While the new division is a Canadian innovation, he says the War Paint concept has caught the attention of New York and other agencies in the Grey network.

In the u.s. particularly, the use of consultants is a big threat to agencies as clients search for the advice they need to nurture and grow their brands. Consulting companies such as Andersen, McKinsey and Bain are becoming increasingly involved in areas such as brand positioning and allocation of marketing budgets while leaving execution and media buying to the advertising agencies.

‘I think clients everywhere are looking out of the box for new solutions,’ says Krupski.

He says it’s not that a small group of senior people like those at War Paint can do something for a brand that an agency can’t, it’s just that they can get to the solution faster, in part because they’ll be dealing with the senior levels of a client organization.

‘I bet I’ve read 100 marketing plans and the plans have ‘speed’ or ‘agility’ somewhere in terms of providing competitive advantage. The traditional agency structure, with all due respect to the one I’m in, isn’t agile enough yet.’

The three principals of War Paint – Bill Booth, consumer insight specialist, Dan Peppler, creative consultant, and Susan Charles, integration strategist – are industry veterans.

Booth began his career in New York at Compton Advertising and then moved to Ted Bates, where he worked out of both New York and Toronto. In 1982, he started the Canadian office of direct marketing agency Stone & Adler and later ran its Chicago office.

Booth returned to Toronto in 1986 to join BBDO Canada and, four years ago, he established his own consultancy, Booth Associates.

Peppler, an award-winning creative director, worked with Needham Harper (now DDB Needham) and J. Walter Thompson early in his career. In 1986, he co-founded Schur Peppler & Associates, which merged with W.B. Doner in 1989 to become Doner Schur Peppler. He was ceo and creative director and, when he left earlier this year, it was renamed Doner Canada.

Charles was most recently director of advertising for Bell Canada. Her wide range of experience includes media, account service, strategic planning and direct marketing for blue-chip clients such as ibm, Molson, Royal Bank, Federal Express and Nestlé.

To continue to deliver on its promise of providing a senior team to clients, Booth says future growth of the firm will mean the addition of other senior teams of three with those same core skills.

He says the formation of War Paint is Grey’s way of repatriating the role the industry abdicated during the downsizing of the late ’80s and early ’90s.

‘Understanding brands has also become much more complicated than it used to be.

‘Brands used to be able to succeed on the basis of some sort of performance superiority or claim. Today, the world has become so technologically driven, you can’t do that any more because your competition could catch up with you overnight.

‘So you need a much deeper understanding not only of what the brand is, but how it connects to the consumer – and that’s where the real insight has to come from.’