CANADA: john st; The Unignoribility Factor

Ever feel you’re just sitting at a desk ageing? Angus Tucker and Stephen Jurisic did, so they set up john st. in order to have more fun. Joe Lancaster finds an agency having a load of fun being ‘unignored’ for work that swaps clichés for cats, clickers and shirtless hunks

One week they were creative directors making a million-dollar TVC for a big agency and the next they were out on their own, shooting a 200-dollar print ad for a miniscule client. It might sound like the worst seven days of Angus Tucker and Stephen Jurisic’s careers had passed in between, but when they left Ammirati Puris Toronto to start their own agency in 2001, the creative partners couldn’t have been happier.

“Being promoted to creative director was a great honour and it was an amazing agency but we [had previously been] these guys who were making stuff and then all of a sudden we were managers and it just kind of wasn’t fun,” explains Jurisic. “I remember Angus sitting across the desk from me and asking, ‘are you having fun?’ and I said, ‘no’. We were just ageing.”

 A curiously creative bacon brief

The pair founded john st., named after its location in central Toronto, with partners Arthur Fleischmann (president), Jane Tucker (MD and Angus’ wife) and Emily Bain (strategic planning director). “It was a chance to do it our way, run it with our philosophy and be a little more nimble,” says Angus Tucker.

Now home to 102 employees and a shelf-load of industry awards, john st. has grown impressively since its inception and earned a reputation as one of the most creative agencies in Canada. In that time Tucker and Jurisic have noticed clients becoming increasingly open to creative solutions. “The thirst for different ideas and more risky ways to go is greater than it was ten years ago by quite a significant margin,” says Tucker, although he acknowledges convincing clients to commit to a creative idea can still be difficult. “Sometimes they’ll walk right up to the altar but it’s hard to get that ring on the finger, but I’m hearing clients in Canada talk about Cannes more than they ever did. There’s an awareness of the power of creativity and how it can give a company a significant advantage over another when in many ways material differences between products don’t really exist anymore, except maybe in a few categories like cell phones.”

Some clients are even asking for creative work in a more creative way. Recently Maple Leaf Foods presented Tucker and Jurisic with a brief for a digital campaign to demonstrate the ‘power of bacon’. The client gave the creatives an article they’d found online about a Louisiana woman who was using bacon to get her family to do chores. Then Maple Leaf revealed they’d fabricated the whole thing. “That’s a perfect example of clients just being into [creativity]. That’s the kind of stuff that we do to clients in presentations, we try to surprise them. It was just so great to see them put that kind of creativity in a brief and it raises the bar for what we’re going to give back to them,” muses Tucker, who points to younger clients being instrumental in the shifting attitudes. “Perhaps as younger clients, who’ve grown up as digital natives, start to take the reins of more companies, they won’t look upon digital work with any sort of scepticism. They just understand that’s the game you have to play, that’s how consumers interact with your brand.” “Maple Leaf was a conservative client in the past,” adds Jurisic. “Now it’s hiring people who are more enlightened and passionate and it gets us charged up too.”

Goggle-eyed at the Google analytics

The resulting campaign, Change Your life With Bacon, achieved “what analytics people at Google called ‘unheard of’ engagement numbers for the online videos,” explains Tucker. The Maple Leaf campaign embodied john st.’s philosophy; ‘be unignorable’ which Tucker explains as being driven to create work that is “unignorable in general but also in its category.” “Every category has things that you always see. In hair care for example it’s a slow-motion twirl of the hair. We try to impress on our clients that when you do that you make your advertising look like their advertising, so it’s not going to give you any point of differentiation or uniqueness. Let’s avoid those ‘sacred cows’ and carve out a unique identity.”

Other recent work that ticks the unignorable box includes the agency’s stunning print, film and experiential campaign for Cashmere bathroom tissue. To appeal to the target sophisticated female market, top fashion designers were enlisted to create dresses made from the product. It secured an additional seven per cent market share for the brand, equating to CAD41.2 million in sales.

In 2011, john st.’s Your Man Reminder campaign for Rethink Breast Cancer aimed to motivate women to regularly check for lumps in their breasts. Opening with the observation that “studies have shown women are more likely to watch a video if it features a hot guy,” an instructional video, which shows how to perform TLC (touch, look, check) is presented by a cast of shirtless hunks. An accompanying app scheduled monthly TLC reminders for the user, with a choice of hot guy to pop up with the message. The work was named one of TED’s 10 Ads Worth Spreading in 2011, won a Webby and the film has had almost seven million YouTube views to date.

Pink ponies and clever cats

It’s not just other brands that john st. is making unignorable advertising for though. They’re doing it for their own too. In 2010 the agency’s Pink Ponies film parodied the award show entry case study film with such razor-sharp wit that it won a Lion itself. Based around the task of making a fake eight-year-old’s birthday party a success, it detailed how the agency’s integrated campaign used various media, including a mini-pony, to achieve a ‘$23.45 average gift price, total attendance of 13 (40 per cent increase from 2009) and various post-party social media impressions’. “People in advertising and marketing loved it. I got an email from the global strategic director of Coca-Cola saying, ‘I love that thing. I want to show it at a board meeting, is that ok?’” recalls Tucker. Since then two more tongue-in-cheek promo films have been released to great success and industry praise. 2011’s Catvertising poked fun at the obsession with online cat videos by claiming that john st. would launch the world’s first feline-staffed ad agency, while 2012’s Buyral sent up the trend for companies offering to boost the number of clicks on web content.

“The self-promo films are something we fell on a little bit by accident but we have to keep doing them now because it gives us street cred, it’s fun and it also gets us commenting on the industry,” explains Tucker, who reveals that a new film will launch around the release date of this magazine. “It also follows our credo of not doing what agencies usually do to promote themselves. Sometimes they come across as super-serious.”

Despite founding john st. to move away from managerial to creative work, Tucker and Jurisic admit they’re now too busy to have a hand in much of the agency’s creative output. But they still have the passion for great work, says Jurisic. “We get close to the work. We shepherd the work,” he enthuses, adding, “One of our art directors said to me the other day, ‘You guys say yes to a lot of things that surprise us’.” Supporting creative work and fighting for their staff’s ideas is something the pair are clearly proud of. “I think our creativity is in getting out of the way and putting the right people in the right place,” says Jurisic, who explains how they like to give youngsters a chance. An example is Miles Jay, a director they hired to shoot interactive short film Carly’s Café, based on the book Carly’s Voice: Breaking through Autism, by john st. president Arthur Fleischmann. “We’ve brought a lot of people from intern up to ACDs and we’ve helped friends like Mark Zibert, who was a photographer and I introduced him to the production company that made him a director. Fostering talent keeps us young and you get a fresh perspective,” says Jurisic.

The cocktail-party eyes test

So what’s next for john st.? “It’s a cliché but we want to do better work,” shrugs Jurisic. “I think the Canadian industry is doing well overall, and we’re going to try to just keep getting better,” he says. But how do they measure their success? “Cocktail parties,” says Tucker. “None of my friends work in advertising so if I’m at a party and someone asks me what I do, I rattle off a couple of campaigns and if their eyes light up and they say, ‘Oh you do that? That’s good stuff, stuff I like,’ that’s when the rubber hits the road.”

Things don’t look like they’re slowing down; in the last year john st. has won accounts including e-reader manufacturer Kobo, off-price fashion retailer Winners, electrical retailer Future Shop, as well as Kronenbourg beer and a pharmaceutical brand. Will the agency retain its name if it ever outgrows its current office?