Starting about five years ago, something happened to Colle+McVoy, one of the Twin Cities’ oldest and most venerable ad and marketing agencies (it was founded in 1935).
It . . . changed. Its brand DNA began to mutate.
Back then, it was headquartered in a gleaming glass tower in Bloomington, across from Normandale Lake. It was known (at least by me) for doing quietly solid work primarily for companies in the ag and outdoors industries, with longtime clients including the Harvest States agriculture co-op.
In 2004, Colle+McVoy hired Christine Fruechte, who’d founded Campbell Mithun’s Youth Marketing Division, as director of client services. She’d been brought in partly to help freshen up the agency’s own brand. Christine (who became president in 2006), then-CEO John Jarvis, and their team saw that, while the traditional ad business was still flourishing, digital marketing was prepped to rocket off into all sorts of unpredictable directions. What’s more, clients were starting to sense this big shift, too.
They also saw that to lure the kind of young talent that it needed to be nimble out in this expanding universe, it needed to get out of the burbs and into the Warehouse District, close to creative-class stomping grounds and the new light-rail line. In 2006, it migrated to the Wyman Building, which itself had just undergone some serious refreshing.
Thus C+M became what Chris Lawrence, the shop’s director of client services—and one of its many newcomers, having joined in August 2009 after stops at Fallon, Campbell Mithun, Olson, and Best Buy—calls a “75-year-old start-up.”
Says Mike Caguin, executive creative director and another relative newcomer to the agency’s bridge: “‘Integration’ had been a big buzzword since the turn of the millennium. We just got there faster.”
So what makes C+M not just solid but buzzy—caffeinated, you might say? An obvious example: Its recent brand refreshing for Caribou Coffee. There’s also the Webby-winning Yearbook Yourself (which it developed for national shopping-mall operator Taubman Centers) and the Twitter-monitoring tool Squawq.
If you want a particularly succinct example of Colle+McVoy’s cool factor, it’s got to be the “Tag the Web” Web site it created in support of Minneapolis-based hip-hop duo Atmosphere’s 2008 album, When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint that Shit Gold, one of the agency’s two Gold (appropriately) Effie winners last year.
When Christine—who became C+M’s CEO in February 2008—joined the agency, its interactive division was in its infancy. Last year, she says, more than 40 percent of the company’s output was digital. Much of that is thanks, she suggests, to the fact that after she directed the construction of the department from nearly zero to 30 people in two years, “we dismantled it. We wanted to fold it into everything we do. We wanted a technology mindset up front, not as a handoff at the end of the process.”
C+M still has many of its traditional clients, like CHS (the product of the merger with Harvest States and Cenex); last year, it nabbed Land O’Lakes online dairy-products business. It’s also still outdoorsy, working with organizations promoting bicycling and hunting and fishing. But these entities also are looking beyond 20th century marketing techniques—a blending of online and offsite.
In coming to C+M, Land O’Lakes knew it had to reach “tech-savvy younger moms,” says Craig Pladson, the agency’s director of interactive strategy—women for whom Land O’Lakes butter is “what their moms and grandmothers used for making cookies.” During 2010, C+M will be working on the challenge of refreshing the brand for younger people—without turning away its rock-solid base of older customers.
As Chris Lawrence notes (and he speaks for a lot of brands), “The challenge is, how do you create the next generation” of customers?
Christine believes that for most brands, that kind of creativity is already there in their DNA, in their roots. What C+M can do, she says, “is connect the dots, make them see what they already have.” That was what C+M did with Caribou—digging out the genetic code embedded in the coffee chain’s longtime slogan, “Life is Short. Stay Awake for It” and mutating it, just a bit, to express new traits. For instance, the agency’s design team drenched the company’s cups with zippy, upbeat maxims and observations (almost like tweets) that look as though they’ve been drawn on by a customer who’s had several espressos.
David Denham, who’s the agency’s director of strategic initiatives (he joined C+M in 2007 after working for the legendary futurist-provocateur Faith Popcorn), describes the types of clients for whom C+M might be a fit as those “looking to enliven their brands, to move from number three to number two in their markets, who are scrappy and willing to try new things, and are open and engaged with their customers.”
C+M knows from its own experience whereof he speaks.
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