By Will Novosedlik
When Sabaa Quao was appointed Cossette’s chief creative officer in the fall of 2022, people in the ad industry scratched their heads. It’s rare that the CCO role is occupied by someone who did not come up through the agency creative ranks. Armed with degrees in marketing, communication and design (including an MBA), as well as more than two decades of leading successful new venture launches and start-ups, Quao was built to innovate.
And that is exactly what Cossette was asking him to do.
In the ad world, innovation usually means “really creative ad campaigns.” It does not mean breaking the business model at start-up speed. So, after three years of deep immersion in the conventional model, and exposure to the widest range of clients of any agency in Canada, it was clear to Quao that one way for an agency to lean into the AI era was to embrace some of the systems and methods of his start-up peers and networks.
He did that by quietly launching Cossette’s new innovation arm, PlusCo Venture Studio, in December 2024. It quickly attracted a handful of startups and got down to business. One of its first partners was Montreal-based Hivelighter, headed up by founder Joshua Dorsey.
The way Dorsey describes it, “Hivelighter is an AI-powered, highlight-based knowledge platform. Built on our proprietary ‘Read for Me’ algorithm, it learns what you value in research, then reads for you by highlighting content for your unique needs and from your unique perspective. It not only reads text but can watch videos, listen to podcasts or read PDFs. Then it converts everything into a common currency (highlights), so all of your media can exist on a single platform in a single currency.”
And it does this at 12x the speed that it would take you to do it, Dorsey adds. “The ‘Read for Me’ algorithm is really a personalization engine. It’s like having another you. ‘Read for Me’ is currently outperforming the best LLM’s at this kind of personalization and customized extraction – by a huge margin.”
According to Quao, the early stage of LLMs has already started to run out of steam.
“But tailored LLMs, purposely built for specific domains and tasks, deliver advantages above and beyond general purpose LLMs,” Quao explains. “We’re tailoring responses, finding unique angles to the problems we are working on, and combining them with our unique profile as an agency. Hivelighter’s approach is to help us find and arrive at unique insights at the start of every project. When the algorithm brings insights from the outside and overlaps them with insights from the inside (from Cossette’s 50 year history), we arrive at an overlap that’s unique to us.”
A further benefit is that, in an agency of Cossette’s scale and legacy, there are mountains of both internally and externally collected current and historical data, disparately spread across the organization. Working in a “single currency” means ease of shareability across the platform and the company.
“The essence of knowledge leadership,” says Dorsey, “is how quickly you can transfer highly valuable insight and knowledge.”
Hivelighter is only one of the companies in PlusCo Venture Studio’s cohort, a group of startups and entrepreneurs with whom Quao is collaborating to work on challenges in financial services, insurance, retail, travel and hospitality, streaming media, strategic marketing services and B2B.
“The AI era is moving faster than an agency normally could,” says Quao. “Working with a cohort of startups and entrepreneurs accelerates us to the speed of AI.”
Quao adds that, so far, he’s yet to see a similar platform at a competing agency. “I’ve seen them within banks, consulting and professional services firms,” he points out. “I’ve had the good fortune to compare notes with two or three of them, and some potential collaborations are taking shape.”
