The folks at MindShare can be forgiven for experiencing a bit of déjà vu. For a second year the UK HQ’d agency, which set up shop here only six years ago, has earned silver ranking in our competition.

Part of its success over the past year has come from continually pushing the boundaries to connect with consumers in an engaging way. And gains in new business have more than made up for the loss of Gillette, actually requiring additional staff to be hired.

A good example is MindShare’s first project for Cadbury Schweppes’ Mott’s Clamato Red Eye, a beverage that combines the popular tomato and clam juice with – wait for it – beer. The creative for the brand was built around the idea of ‘Not your expected drink,’ so the agency approached Sun Media Group and worked with the sports sections of the chain’s newspapers in Ottawa and Toronto to bring that concept to life.

For 10 weeks the Sun writers – independent of client input – created the ‘Not Your Expected Sports Page,’ which included interesting atypical sports info and quirky facts for its readers, while providing relevant content for the brand to be associated with. It was a first for the paper, which had never written editorial before for an advertiser. MD Karen Nayler says this campaign also proves that new, innovative, and engaging ideas don’t always have to be about non-traditional media.

But non-traditional executions – like the DVD launch of Twentieth Century Fox’s off-colour animated series, The Family Guy – have also been wildly successful for the agency.

The viral Internet campaign focused on fan favourite Stewie Griffin, the irascible matricidal baby in the show. The effort involved online ads as well as stewielive.com, a site where fans were invited to get Stewie to perform any one of 150 actions.

‘That site has just gone gangbusters and is continuing to run well beyond the launch (of the DVD) and has been picked up in the U.S. The sales for the DVD have been twice what they projected and we have over seven million unique North American visitors to date.’

Nayler adds: ‘That’s engagement – and from a very simple yet key insight: that Stewie, and what was going to come out of his mouth next, was why people watched.’