Toronto shop TrojanOne has rebranded, changing its name to T1, reflecting its shift from an experiential shop to one that offers full, strategic and creative thinking for clients.

Founded in 1994 by Mark Harrison as Trojan Sports Marketing, the shop has since morphed from one focused on experiential marketing into also offering marketing communications, sponsorship consulting, brand activations and consumer-based event management.

“The only thing that we really don’t do is traditional advertising, and we’re really proud of that,” says Graham Lee, chief creative officer. “What used to be experiential expertise is now being done by every good agency in the world,” he says. “Great agencies will have developed those disciplines because advertising is changing in essence to be more experiential.”

Part of the shop’s shift has meant bolstering the creative department. Since Lee joined the shop in 2014, it has been working on growing its creative team, adding copywriter and art director teams (it now has four full-time teams in its 65-person office, along with adding designers, production staff and creative operations people).

T1’s current client base includes brands such as Air Miles, Dairy Farmers of Canada, OLG, ParticipAction, Nike, Coca-Cola and Nissan.

While the name change isn’t all that different, especially since many clients already called the shop “T1,” it’s also meant to show the agency’s priority of putting “thinking first.”

“We’ve heard every condom joke in the world, certainly in the short time I’ve been here,” Lee says of the TrojanOne name. “But the reason the name didn’t change dramatically is because of all the great value TrojanOne had built up over those years.”

“We wanted to become famous for ideas that scale,” says Harrison, T1’s president. “Until yesterday, I ran this company for 21 years and actually never called this an agency,” he adds, saying that he referred to it more as a sports marketing company or brand activation company in previous years. “We are now an agency.”