It's believed Napoleon said, “If you start to take Vienna - take Vienna.” If you’re claiming to sell creativity, if you say you’re about standing out, you’d better be creative and stand out. As John St., a Toronto-based advertising agency, says, “We exist to make our clients' brands unignorable”. So how does one command attention and win over new business clients? In a bold move that could have easily gone from making a joke to being a joke, John St.’s ‘Pink Ponies: A Case Study’ campaign was both a playful poke at marketing jargon and an extraordinarily creative way to promote their services. “In 2010 John St. took on its toughest challenge yet. Make Chelsea Bedano’s birthday party a success in an already cluttered birthday market. The results were astounding.” Putting the ‘cute’ in ‘perfectly executed’, John St. demonstrated that they were more than a bunch of verbose automatons.
Turning cheap talk into expensive talk by bridging the digital with the physical to reach clients is BREAKFAST: a physical-digital interactive agency based in New York. Their B-Line telephone: a special phone for prospective clients. Simply picking up the receiver calls all three BREAKFAST co-founders. Taking into consideration how many awkward telephone calls businesses get from hungry agencies claiming to be creative, they were curious to see if prospective clients could be enticed to pick up the phone and call them. Leaving a far more indelible impression than an intangible email, the B-Line won BREAKFAST not only new business but great word of mouth. After all, you can’t sell creativity if you can’t prove immediately that you have it.