Calling it a “great canvas to showcase our design chops,” AndSo built Bickford’s brand around expert craft and sharp wit, pairing a bold visual identity with the tagline “Hand made. Mouth drank.”
A 40-foot reflective cube with 100 million video inputs made for a museum. A traditional ad campaign for paint that uses AI to steal the greatest colours of all time. One of Canada’s largest XM assignments. Creating boutique hotel brands in Portugal and Paris for Marriott’s Autograph Collection and refreshing a legendary indie in Philadelphia.
All of this work is set to come out of AndSo over eight months. The company doubled its client roster and posted a fourfold revenue boom this year. That growth is directly tied to its past creative work – an intriguing mix of projects that isn’t the standard output from an ad agency. That’s because AndSo isn’t one. At least, not in the pure sense. Yes, the independent creative shop does make a lot of ad campaigns. But that only describes about half of its creative output.
An immersive experience with over 100 million combinations of generative audio and visuals, allowing guests to literally step into the invisible world of Quantum computing.
“We work with companies that might not consider an ad agency because they have different needs, and want a different flavour of creativity,” says Shawn Topp, strategy director and partner. “They’re looking to colour outside the lines of a traditional media buy, and they don’t see the value of fleeting earned media grabs. They want something genuinely new and memorable.”
For that reason, Toronto-based AndSo, which launched almost five years ago, calls itself a “modern creative company” because it is just as likely to create a 5-day event for the federal government for 150,000 people in Germany (2025) as it is to create a hand-made brand for a hand-made microbrewery (2024) or launch a giant spray paint can with a traditional TV campaign (2023).
As disparate as the outputs are, it’s all born from AndSo’s key difference: placing a premium on innovative thinking and untethering from a more conventional way of working.
AndSo led branding and creative for Canada’s NGEN at Hannover Messe, delivering pavilion design, press tours and large-scale events for 250+ exhibitors.
“Anyone can say they’re dedicated to innovation, but to actually be innovative, you have to walk the walk,” says Jake Bogoch, creative director and partner. “Innovation is creative ambition, realized. We built this company with a non-traditional structure to help our clients get there.”
You can see AndSo’s commitment to developing new working models in its “writer’s room.” When a project demands a huge volume of different ideas, AndSo will assemble its writer’s room, the first one specially assembled for brands. This puts writers from non-advertising backgrounds (a Pulitzer Prize finalist, journalists, screenwriters, sci-fi novelists, and a James Beard Award winning food writer) in a room with AndSo copywriters. Late night TV and comedy series use writer’s rooms to great effect. AndSo uses its room to make brand work. The difference is a perspective from living outside the halls of an ad agency. It’s also a wildly efficient way to generate a lot of ideas, and quickly.
Take the example of Tremclad, a giant paint brand with thousands of products. Two years ago, Tremclad launched Turbo, a patented spray paint can with more paint power. AndSo turned to the writer’s room. The small group lobbed ideas around until they came up with a unique insight: No matter who you are or what language you speak, there’s only one way to pretend that you’re spray painting: You extend a hand, curl one index finger, and say “psshht.” AndSo’s writer’s room typed ‘pssshht’ in uppercase to convey power and acted it out.
The agency’s unique writer’s room process was leveraged for this 360 campaign, to comedic (and effective) results.
“The whole room fell down laughing, so we knew it was something right away,” says Bogoch. From there, the script was written in minutes. It was further developed into a campaign with no music, odd characters, and a comic tension to land that clear message of painting with power. (Turbo then posted an impressive 60.3% sales growth of the hero product, according to Rust-Oleum, the parent company of Tremclad.)
This May, AndSo launched the latest Rust-Oleum campaign for paint brand Colour Spark. Midstream budget cuts forced the creative team to revamp the entire campaign. “We had to throw out the ideas because they were too expensive. This pushed us to reverse engineer our thinking toward the very edge of the limitations,” says Bogoch. Working with The Deli and Tantrum, the group pioneered a new production model that merged AI with a traditional live action shoot. The result is a big idea, TV-ready campaign, produced for a fraction of what it would normally cost.
“Partnering with AndSo has been truly transformational for our business,” says Frank Kocis, who leads communications for Rust-Oleum Canada. “As our creative agency, they have helped to define and expand our brand voice in ways we simply couldn’t have without them. Their ideas are driving our business bravely forward.”
That creative approach, to ensure that clear messages guide big ideas, has brought AndSo an enviable mix of clients. AndSo regularly works with familiar brands like Telus, RBC, and Tremclad, but they’ve also been approached by a world-famous DJ duo to create a comprehensive stadium graphics system. They are working with the Perimeter Institute, a world-leading quantum computing organization to visualize unfathomable physics into public art. And they continue to work on a wide range of assignments for NGen, a federally funded accelerator for advanced manufacturing.
“We’ve found that clients love our commitment to ambitious and innovative thinking,” says AndSo president Mike Mills. “The world is changing, and what clients value from their partners will continue to evolve. So our model is rooted in an allergy to the status quo.”
The transparency and honesty to clients has also been a key part of AndSo’s internal culture and structure. “We’ve created a flat structure and a fearless culture that rewards people for being upfront, open, and comfortable at work,” says Topp. “They find it as rewarding as reading an advertorial you wrote about yourself.”
CONTACT:
Mike Mills
President
mike@andso.ca
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