Sid Lee’s president, J.F. Bouchard, told Ad Age why his agency decided to venture into a new industry.
Ad Age: A lot of agencies today are creating more than ads and striking interesting equity deals with businesses. What’s different or better about your model?
Mr. Bouchard: We have said that the ultimate creative challenge is to create a company (emphasis added), and it’s something we’ve been preparing for a long time. In this case it’s a start-up company called Functionalab we’ve helped bring to life by providing multidisciplinary expertise. We sat down with a company and provided them the full range of what we call “commercial creativity”: architecture, packaging, industrial design, interactive marketing.
Building a true innovation offering implies that you can help clients create new products and new services. There are agencies are venturing into that, and some are doing it in very interesting ways. What sets us apart is how we have built one comprehensive team that can help companies at every single consumer contact point.
In other Sid Lee news, the agency has written the book on Conversation Capital.