For Hilton Hotels & Resorts, Fuse Create built a pop-up hotel room off the sixth green at the 2022 Canadian Open, giving six lucky golf fans the ultimate stay. The initiative earned 500M impressions and 2M social engagements.
A pop-up Hilton hotel room on the green at the Canadian Open. Getting your “Everyday Voice” back with Ricola. Waking up refreshed after achieving your dream state with Sleep-eze. These are some of the campaigns that have helped make this past year one of Fuse Create’s strongest yet.
It all comes after Fuse took home Small AOY Bronze last November.
“We’ve had momentum since then,” says VP, executive creative director Steve Miller. “Hiring has grown in every department, and we’ve got a new office with a retail space for experiential events.” He adds business is up 30% over 2021.
Much of Fuse’s growth has come through social and the media planning and buying behind it. As a result, Fuse Create launched a content studio to work closely with brands such as Ricola, Air Miles, Old Dutch Foods, and Schneiders. The images shown for those companies ran across multiple social platforms.
Fuse continues to nurture established relationships with the likes of Maple Leaf Foods, Purolator, Schneiders, Air Miles, CIBC and Burnbrae Farms.
Fuse Create developed Ricola’s first campaign targeting everyday voice care outside the cough and cold season. This award-winning campaign drove a 500% boost in sales in the GTA and has been picked up in the US and Germany.
Among its new wins is Sinai Health, for which it has been named creative AOR, which will boost the agency’s bid to build an integrated business. Fuse will be responsible for repositioning the brand, media buying, helping to create stakeholder and internal alignment, and boosting fundraising.
Other wins include Nestlé, Proximo Spirits, Tetley, Ricola Germany, Great Clips and Ontario Place.
Fuse is celebrating 20 years with no outside funding or talk of being consumed by a global or national agency. Its growth can be attributed in part to its 2020 rebrand from Fuse Marketing Group to Fuse Create.
“When we rebranded we had a mindset shift,” says CEO Stephen Brown. “The agency had long been operating with a lens of being highly productive, affecting everything from production, timelines, the brief, how success was measured, and the creative product itself. That approach was working, but it wasn’t winning.
Fuse research showed the true benefit of a sleep aid wasn’t the sleep itself but waking up in the morning feeling refreshed. So they dreamed up this category-defying campaign for Sleep-eze working alongside absurdist filmmakers The Perlorian Brothers, driving the highest sales in two years.
“When we rebranded, the impetus was to establish a creative mindset that would make the efficacy and quality of the creative product the absolute priority. When you do that, [all other measurables] look different. We needed to evolve philosophically to build a reputation, attract the right talent and clients, and ultimately create a winning creative culture. This led us to ranking the #3 Small Agency in Canada.”
After winning Sinai Health’s creative AOR assignment, Fuse’s first task was to dimensionalize the word “care” in the on-going “See What Care Can Do” campaign, putting a name and face to the care it gives. TV, OOH, print, radio, and paid social will bring that care to life. The next assignment is Mt. Sinai Hospital’s 100th Anniversary.
And it has helped Fuse grow. It is now 70 strong with key hires including veteran creative director Linda Carte, along with four new staff in the creative department, three on its social content team, and two in media.
Meanwhile, experiential marketing – which accounts for 30% of agency business – although challenged during pandemic lockdowns, has quickly rebounded.
One of the firm’s biggest experiential successes this year has been for Hilton Hotels & Resorts. Fuse built a 200-sq. ft. hotel room pop-up at the third-tee box at the Women’s Open and just off the eighth green at the men’s tourney.
Says Miller, “Guests stayed overnight, they could sit and watch the tournament, and they had their own golf cart, gourmet meals, and a concierge. It garnered about half a billion media impressions and nearly two million social engagements.”
Another winning campaign was for Ricola. Known as a cough and sore-throat remedy, the brand suffered revenue losses as people weren’t getting as many colds during the pandemic. To bring back sales, Fuse developed “Everyday Voice,” a campaign that pivoted the brand from a cold remedy to a way of combating the hoarseness we all experience after days of virtual meetings.
Demonstrating new usage occasions drove incremental sales, and the repositioning tested so well in Canada that Germany is running a modified version of the campaign, exposing Fuse to the European market.
Internally, Miller and Brown are proud of the culture they have built. Brown points to the addition of mental health days to its vacation offering, as well as 24/7 Telus Health support for employees, and paying for the Calm app for those who want it. Such initiatives may explain the agency’s 80%+ retention level.
At any family holiday get-together, there’s bound to be an argument, be it over politics, boyfriends, religion, or COVID-19. So Fuse put together a deck of cards offering “52 Better Fights to Have” to help families make it through. It landed on tables across Canada and even at board game venue Snakes & Lattes.
“We have carefully curated the culture with these small but meaningful touches,” he says. “This is one of the fundamental reasons for our success.”
CONTACT:
Steve Miller
VP, executive creative director
steve@fusecreate.com
The 2023 Indie List:
Intro
Zulu Alpha Kilo: Borderless creativity
Agnostic: Meeting brand demand in health and food
123w: Creative-driven M.O. serves as brand accelerant
Push Media: Focus on audience and research serves changing brand needs
Lg2: Fresh lens; different perspectives
Ray Agency: Leading brands to unexpected places
Rain: Growing to reach new heights
G&G: Celebrating a decade of success
Round: A model for our (budget-conscious) times
Sister Merci: Homegrown cannabis brand building cred
A&C: Connecting for growth and the greater good
