Fuse rebrands and streamlines creative approach

FUSECreate_Collage

Toronto independent agency Fuse is rebranding and combining its advertising and experiential offerings to offer a more streamlined and holistic approach to creative work.

The restructuring will integrate the creative and strategic offering of Fuse Marketing Group with experiential division Fuse Live to become Fuse Create. In addition to a new name and logo (created by Jacknife), the combined offering will singularly communicate the agency’s “channel-agnostic approach and philosophical shift to a ‘creative first’ mindset,” as it describes in a press release.

Steve Miller, VP, ECD and partner at Fuse, says the change will help the agency be more creative-first and provide more of a 360-degree offering.

“It started to make sense to fuse these two brands, these two deliverables, together to take a sort of ‘one plus one equals three’ approach,” he tells strategy. Miller adds that this rebrand won’t just streamline processes on the creative front, but also internally, from an operations’ standpoint.

“It’ll drive a stronger cohesion among the employees in our teams who, in the past, might have felt a little more siloed,” he says. “There’s a literal coming together of everyone within the two previous brands that now just feel like a more streamlined agency.”

Miller says this “streamlined approach” is a response to more holistic briefs the agency has been receiving for the past 18 to 24 months. “The ask isn’t so much by channel – it’s really by solution,” he says. “There’s a greater combining of thinking, of resources, and of expertise within Fuse Marketing Group and Fuse Live that is naturally occurring, because of this shift in ask, that it just made sense, operationally, to do that as well.”

Stephen Brown, CEO of Fuse Create, says the argument can be made that the seed for a rebrand at Fuse started prior to Miller’s arrival last March. “We were doing good creative. We needed to do great creative. And we needed that cultural shift to be much more of a creative burst mindset of an agency,” Brown says. “That started the engine of changing our brand, which really is Steve Miller coming on board, helping us change the culture. Because it’s not a case of just the work. It’s a case of the spirit that goes along with the work, that creates the work.”

Brown adds that the way Fuse approaches the way it works with clients has also changed over the years, to go beyond the ask in a brief. “If they ask for a square, we would’ve given them a square,” Brown says. “Now, chances are we walked into the clients before the brief, and talked to them. ‘What are you doing for Father’s Day? We have some ideas we want to talk to you about that are going to make people think differently about your brand.’ We’re having those conversations earlier.”