sean barlow

What happens when the kids who were told to “turn off that damn TV and go outside” grow up and have kids of their own with screens they never would have dreamed of? How do you address this when you’re a brand with the actual word “Nature” in your name? 

To shed light on our changing relationship with nature, we grabbed 3 generations of the same families, and had them answer one simple question - What did you do for fun as a kid?

The resulting video has garnered over 25 million views at last check, $3.7 Million worth of earned media and is responsible for a 35% increase in sales.

Most Canadians think that Habitat builds homes in far away developing and disaster struck countries. We had to not only make them aware of the need here at home, but also get them to care. 

So, we created a PSA that showed a family's journey of upheaval and the daughter's innocent efforts to build a home out of toy blocks. We then got people to donate and help bring that dream to life.

With a $0 media budget, the toy house helped Habitat receive over $300,000 in donated media and generate over 78 million social impressions.

Ronald McDonald House Charities team up with Westjet to help a father connect with his son on the best day of the year.

Meridian wanted to reset itself and launch a new campaign to drive its range of deposit products for 2 targets: new and existing Meridian members, and urban millennials. The solution was a campaign built on the idea that your money should make more of itself. With no previous campaign equities to build on, the challenge was to come up with something new to achieve the breakthrough and awareness we needed. So we created an animated universe, grounded in the corporate brand equity colours, and presented Money in a range of humorous lifestyle scenarios that our target audiences could relate to.

Fish where the fish are. It’s a shrinking category, and we had very little budget. But, when we dug deep into Twitter, we found Pizza Pops mentions over-indexed – big time. Easy to believe when some of the teenagers we checked had well over 40,000 or 50,000 tweets.

Instead of talking at them, we talked with them and invited them to pick our next flavour in March Madness fashion.

McDonald’s Canada wanted to elevate the perception of their value picks meals. We came up with the idea that when you get delicious McDonald’s food at a really great price, you don’t just feel pretty great about yourself, you feel like a GD Genius.

BMW Global came to Cundari to help launch their new online marketplace to buy and sell your BMW. Autohub was created, although with this launch video and support in pilot countries around the world.

When you ask people what they did after work, the answers are often pretty uninspiring. So to show the 9-5 crowd just how much more inspiring their nights could be at the Toronto School of Art, we created a series of original oil paintings in a renaissance-style depicting the boring ways people often spend their nights. Treating the mundane in a style normally reserved for the epic, we turned these boring nights into works of art.  

A fresh new account feature (sweep) deserves a fresh new approach for the way we educate people about the account.

We talked to people, lots of them. As it turns out, people didn’t know that Dempster’s is a Canadian company. And, as it turns out, a certain controversial president south of the border was giving the Canadian food industry a tough time. We developed a simple “Made by Canada” as a long-term brand idea to drive brand affection. Sales were up double digits in less than 4 weeks. Now in year 4, year over year double-digit growth continues.

Who's the enemy in the parking lot? You guessed it – shopping carts. And what better way to remind people that Fix Auto is the first place they should think of for dings and bangs.

A new snack bun in Canada, we leaned into something unique, and ‘ownable’, the name itself. We produced 5 :15 second preroll spots as well as a sampling program featuring “pull apart” tearaway pants. (just when you thought you’d never see tearaways ever again)

The Bounce dryer bar allows you to just set it, and forget it. So much so, that you’ll forget it was in some of the most watched videos ever.

We’re picky about so many smaller decisions in life. Don’t you think we should be picky about at banking?