Hasta La Creative!

Industry veteran Shane Ogilvie, who spent the last three years as ECD at Toronto’s Zulu Alpha Kilo, has left that shop to co-found his own business with former Zulu Executive Planning Director Shari Walczak.

Their venture, The Garden North America, will function as a self-described “new breed of creative company.” What does that mean?

The key, it seems, is flexibility. The agency wants potential clients to know that it can do traditional advertising…but it can also do lots of other stuff too.

As the release puts it, “Anything can grow in a garden.” From Ogilvie himself:

“Our output will be different for every company because it will be based on their individual needs…could be a brand repositioning or social strategy, or it could involve operational design or customer experience innovations. Because the process starts further upstream, the possibilities are endless.”

Rather than hire in-house teams to do that work, The Garden will outsource it:

“Ogilvie and Walczak say The Garden will employ a unique model wherein teams of experts will be custom built and brought in to address specific problems.”

Ogilvie writes from experience: after starting his career at Holmes and Lee (now Reason Partners), he spent more than six years as a senior copywriter and ACD at DDB Canada, working on Capital One, State Farm, Budweiser, Subaru, and various other accounts; Grey Canada later hired him as a creative director.

At Zulu, Ogilvie’s ECD credit appeared on recent campaigns created for Corona, Audi, and Coke Zero.

Walczak also brings two decades of agency experience to the new role: prior to joining Zulu in 2012 as executive strategy director, she was strategic planning director at fellow Toronto shop john st.; previous titles include VP/GM/senior brand strategist at Cossette and account-based roles at Leo Burnett’s Toronto office.

The Garden has not signed formal agreements with any clients at the moment, but its principals are “currently working with several companies who have shown interest in the new model,” so we should have updates soon.

Taco Bell wants you to live mas. Corona wants you to live mas fina. If the trend continues, we’re one year away from Walmart telling us to live mejor.

Corona’s Canadian rebranding comes from Toronto-based Zulu Alpha Kilo and its Quebec agency partner, TANK. Let’s tackle all the moving parts: an English campaign with a Spanglish slogan for a Mexican company created by a Canadian agency. If you ever needed proof of NAFTA, there you go.

The debut spot, which runs sixty seconds, clearly targets younger demographics of drinkers and asks them to live life without regret. Surf, protest deforestation, look at aurora borealis, etc. While you’re experiencing the etc., you should also drink Corona. It’s silly to associate Corona with “the finer life,” but the commercial is well done and effectively sentimental, according to the viewer response on Youtube. I’d have to agree, even if there are no beaches.

Credits after the jump.

continued…

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