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November 3, 2003 - Strategy Magazine
Special Report: Western Canada

Coping with client drain
Hard times, U.S. affiliations, and lean, mean creativity drive Vancouver ad shops south of the border

by Brendan Christie
page 26

The Rockies have always been a fence that keeps west and east minding their own business. So it's only natural that Vancouver agencies experiencing tough times would look south for solace.

With major U.S. markets just over the border in California and Washington State - sharing the same time zone, populated by consumers with the same attitudes who commiserate over the same rain - it's little wonder that Van's own have found southern success by offering U.S. clients more for their money.

A decade of downsizing and consolidation has made an impression on Vancouver. In what has traditionally been a self-contained market, moves like the 1998 BC Tel/Telus merger have cut rents in the advertising fabric of the city, and two years after the NDP/Liberal flip, uncertainty still lingers over one of the largest advertisers in the province, the B.C. government itself. Naturally, local agencies have not escaped the tumult.

Virginia Greene, president of Go Direct Marketing (acquired by Chicago's J. Walter Thompson over two years ago), estimates that Van's advertising business has shrunk by half in the last decade. The scope of the losses was made especially evident last year when, from the heights of its New York edifices, Omnicom decided three agencies were too many for one market and folded Lanyon Phillips Communications into its other two holdings, Palmer Jarvis DDB and Bryant Fulton & Shee. Most contacted by Strategy believe there are still too many players in the field and more might go.

But new MacLaren McCann GM Danielle Wilson chooses to see hard times in Van as a blessing in disguise. "It's been a great thing for the agencies," she notes, "because in that down-time we've all developed our customer relationship management capabilities, our interactive and e-commerce capabilities [and other capacities]. I don't know if we would have developed those skills if the client base didn't drive it.

"We've become more imaginative communicators. To me that's certainly one of the appeals of the Vancouver marketplace versus some of the U.S. marketplaces. You have fewer dollars and fewer resources but you have the same marketing talent. So you need to be creative."

It was for times like these

that the Germans coined the term Schadenfreude. If Vancouver got it bad, the west coast of the U.S. got it worse. Many agencies in the western U.S. were perched on the bubble with tech clients, and when times got tough, agency shrinkage saw creative talent leave for friendlier climes. That has led to an American need for lean, creative marketing operations - just the sort that have been incubating in Vancouver.

And in that vacuum several left-coast agencies have begun to find a niche south of the border.

One big happy family

Some of that southward expansion has certainly been spurred by U.S. affiliations. At the beginning of October for example, Van's Go Direct along with the JWT mother ship in Chicago and its Minneapolis digital division pitched and won work from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Greene expects most of the work will be done north of the 49th.

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