If you ask Rob Reilly about the thinking behind WPP’s new home in Toronto’s Waterfront Innovation Centre and why it matters, he has a really simple explanation: “The cobbler’s kids can’t have the worst shoes.”

Reilly (pictured, left), the global CCO for WPP, spoke to strategy at the grand opening of the facility on Wednesday. The plan to move its many Toronto agencies under a single roof was first announced in 2018, and has now been realized in a state-of-the-art facility on Queen’s Quay East. It brings the holding company’s 2,000 employees, from agencies including GroupM (Wavemaker, Mindshare and EssenceMediacom), Ogilvy, Wunderman Thompson, Hill+Knowlton Strategies, Grey, Taxi, Hogarth Worldwide and Landor & Fitch.

“A lot of agencies don’t have a great space. And while you can say that great ideas can come from anywhere, when I walked in here, I was blown away,” Reilly says. “I do think that matters. Confidence is a big thing, and when you’re working for a company that’s thriving and walk into a nice workplace, you feel like there is a higher standard of creativity that’s expected.”

The new facility is seen by Mark Read, WPP’s CEO (pictured, right), as “an accelerant to our strategy” in Canada.

“We need to continue to do great work and attract the best talent in the business,” he explains. “There’s a great heritage here of Canadian creative teams doing work on global brands like Dove. There are great creative businesses like Taxi that have an impact on global culture. This investment is a statement of our commitment to this market and is a space for the world’s most talented and creative people to come to work.”

But the new facility isn’t just about making WPP and its various agencies more desirable places to work. It’s also about finding efficiencies within the holding company’s operations here in Canada, and helping it walk its talk about sustainability.

To that end, the campus has applied for and is on its way to receiving Platinum LEED certification. Built on reclaimed land along Toronto’s waterfront by WPP’s BDG Architecture and Design, the 250,000-square-foot facility “looks like a big, impressive building, but it’s more efficient for us than the way we used to work,” says Read.

“Previously, we had people spread out across many buildings in Toronto,” he adds. “Now it is all, physically, together in one place. People can just go across the hall, or we can spin up team rooms or even organize by client. It’s very flexible, this space. There’s a lot of potential for improving the degree of collaboration, which I think is at the heart of a lot of the best creative ideas today.”

“When you get all of these people in the same place, it’s easy to get to them and show them that we are able to unleash this group in a lot of ways,” adds Reilly. “And they don’t have to move – they can have global impact from here… But we have to be together.”