Andy Macaulay is only half joking when he says the ultimate goal of his ad agency is world domination. Seated next to him in a boardroom in Zig's ultracasual offices in Toronto's entertainment district, Macaulay's partners, Lorraine Tao and Elspeth Lynn, roll their eyes at his boast—but they don't contradict him. They, too, think it's possible. After all, look how far they've come, just the three of them, since they started the agency in 1999.
Today they employ more than 70 people, 30 of whom are on the creative side. Their client list includes the likes of Molson, Ikea, Best Buy, Virgin Mobile and Unilever. Zig was behind last summer's ubiquitous Molson ads in which Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones is tied up and expelled from the country by angry Canucks when he expresses doubts about Canadians' devotion to beer.
The agency's best ads have a fun, pop-feminist sensibility. In the early days, the partners' calling card was a piece of pro bono work: a television ad in which a horny teenager named Cam offers to examine women's breasts for them—if they're too lazy or ill-informed to do the cancer-screening exam themselves. "Put your breasts in my hands," he exhorts. ("We had to make sure he was cute, a little innocent, because otherwise it would have seemed creepy," Lynn says.) For Special K, Zig's creation showed average guys bemoaning their average bodies as if they were self-abasing women. "I just have to accept," one whines, "that I have my mother's thighs."
In June, Zig won a gold medal at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival for its Blair Witch Project-style footage on the Internet promoting Scream TV, a cable channel specializing in horror programming.
Related Articles
And before the three partners left for home, their peers from around the globe had named the once-little Canadian shop the world's third-best media agency. Zig had become world class, if not—at least not yet—a world-beater.
It's a risk-filled time for Zig, nonetheless. In the advertising business, where small size and street cred go hand in hand, growth carries a stigma: Little equals good and edgy, or so the theory goes. "The bigger you become, the more boring you get," says Frank Palmer, CEO of the Vancouver-based agency DDB Canada, as if reciting an industry truism. "The award shows are dominated by the small agencies."
Such is the fear of size that when Canada's most admired agency, Taxi, grew to over 150 staffers last year, its legendary founder, Paul Lavoie, subdivided the firm into Taxi I and Taxi II. His goal was to produce two lean, edgy agencies rather than risk being saddled with a bloated, complacent one. At the time, Lavoie likened growth to the spread of cancer cells.
Alan Middleton, a former president and CEO of the global ad agency J. Walter Thompson Co., and now a professor at the Schulich School of Business, echoes the conventional wisdom: "You expand, you get bigger clients. But the bigger brands are often less accepting of risk, and so the quality of the work declines. You begin to lose traction, to lose what made you unique in the first place." Middleton believes Zig's recent work for Molson is a case in point: The ads, he says, were "unimaginative" and "not up to par."
The tasks involved in managing a thriving business usually differ radically from what needs to be done to get a new one off the ground. Over the past three years, as Zig attracted major accounts like Unilever, Best Buy and Molson, the change in how work was distributed had become more and more of a problem for its partners. Lynn, an art director by training, and Tao, a copywriter, found they had less time to do the creative work that had initially attracted them to the profession. Instead, they had to devote an increasing number of their working hours to hiring and managing the staff, and also to keeping clients satisfied. Even more frustrating was the fact that every day they had to review the campaigns created and conceived by others.
"I don't know exactly when it happened, but as we got bigger, Lorraine and I had less and less time to work together," says Lynn. "We started noticing the happiness level going down," Tao adds.
Lynn completes the thought: "We'd carve out little projects to work on together just to be able to do it again, and we'd inevitably only be able to get to them after hours."
14
