The Globe and Mail is Canada’s leading newspaper. This story, by reporter John Heinzl, describes one of my Canadian ad career’s more memorable projects. Soon after, I moved to Kansas City to work for Muller & Associates (now Muller Bressler Brown). Yes, that’s me. I sure wish I still had those glasses.
From The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business, June 7 1999…
THE TELECOM FORMERLY KNOWN AS ATLANTICCO ISSUED A CHALLENGE – CREATE A NEW MONIKER FOR THE COMPANY THAT YOUNG PEOPLE WOULD DIG, CAN WORK IN TWO LANGUAGES AND DOESN’T CONTAIN ‘TEL’. AD SHOP SGCI ACCEPTED – THEN THE CRAZINESS BEGAN.
At 3:40 p.m. on April 5, an unusual fax arrived at SGCI Communications Inc., an advertising agency in tiny Sackville, N.B. It was from Atlantic Canada’s newly merged telecommunication company, temporarily dubbed AtlanticCo.
We need help finding a permanent name, the fax said. Here are the rules: It must consist of one word with no more than three syllables; work in both of Canada’s official languages; connote qualities such as “innovative,” young,” and “nimble;” be gender neutral; and because telecommunications isn’t our only business, the name absolutely cannot contain “tel.”
By the way, we’re kind of in a hurry. You have three days.
Three days? Normally, developing a name can take three months. The same fax was sent to four other agencies, setting in motion of of the most bizarre competitions in Canadian advertising, culminating last week with the launch of the new name, Aliant Inc., in a splashy ad campaign. If finding the new name seemed hurried, developing the campaign was enough to drive anyone silly.
“It was,” says Mark Gardiner, creative director at SCGC, “insane.”
“We were looking for and agency that was quick and nimble, and that’s certainly where SGCI nailed it”
AtlanticCo, a company with $1.7 billion in revenue, had to move quickly indeed. Formed in March by the merger of Atlantic Canada’s four telephone companies, it needed to have its new name and logo in place well before June 1, the day its shares would begin trading. The name would appear not only in the ad campaign but in stock tables, on share certificates and umpteen other places.
On the afternoon the fax arrived at SGCI, Mr. Gardiner briefed the 10 employees in his creative department. He then dispatched someone to find a lawyer who could do trademark searches (finding a name that isn’t already taken can be a challenge, as AtlanticCo would later discover).
The next day, SGCI’s creative team met twice to toss around potential names. They assembled a list of 75 candidates, including such clunkers as Semaphore, Lucca, Celeritas, Neptune and Vivim. Vivim? “I don’t know, Vivim sounds like something you’d clean your windows with,” Mr. Gardiner admits.
After weeding out out those dogs and others, SGCI sent a list of six serious contenders – Azimuth, Avantix, Langis, Imago, Aria, Prospera – to AtlanticCo and waited for a response. Several days went by. Nothing. Then on April 12, another fax arrived from AtlanticCo.
We don’t like any of your names, it said, but would you be interested in developing a logo and ad campaign around four names that were submitted by other agencies? (Those names were Forlantic, Elantos, Alterra, and Aliant.) We’ll need a complete presentation, the fax said, with details about your proposed campaign, the media strategy, public relations plan, etc., and you’ll be competing against other agencies, of course, at your own expense.
By the way, the presentations are St. John’s. In three days.
Huh? SGCI was tempted to say thanks, but no thanks. Mounting a major pitch in such a short time would be both expensive and disruptive, particularly for a 45-person agency. Besides, being the smallest of those invited, it considered itself a dark horse, particularly after its names were rejected.
AtlanticCo didn’t really consider SGCI a serious contender, either. “To be honest with you... we invited them almost out of courtesy,” says Mark Lever, a Halifax marketing consultant who was brought in by AtlanticCo to lead the agency selection process.
Despite the steep odds, SGCI deiced to jump in. The main reason: One of its biggest clients is New Brunswick Telephone Co. Ltd., a partner in the AtlanicCo merger. By not participating, SGCI would have sent the wrong signal to N.B. Tel.
“Once we decide to do this, we said, ‘All right, let’s not panic,” Mr. Gardiner says. Account people cleared their calendars of appointments. Employees called their spouses to say they’d be home late, if at all. And virtually everyone pitched in to meet what seemed like an impossible deadline.
With the clock ticking, each of SGCI’s four art directors was given a different company name and told to design a logo, along with sample business cards and letterhead for each one. They also developed sample brochures, newspaper and Internet ads for some of the names.
The agency’s media department worked to prepare a sample plan outlining where the proposed ads would appear and how much they would cost. Meanwhile, Doug Simpson, the SGCI partner in charge of client services, put together a roughly 50-page document laying out he entire communications strategy.
On the morning of the pitch, Mr. Gardiner, Mr. Simpson and an account executive flew from Moncton to Halifax and on to St. John’s. The flight featured some tense moments. Two competing agencies from Halfiax – Bristol Group, Inc. and Corporate Communications, Ltd. – were said to be on board too, so SGCI officials couldn’t discuss their pitch with each other. Mr. Gardiner says he was too afraid to even study his notes lest someone peer over his shoulder.
When all three agencies were finished pitching – two others that participated in the name contest had by now dropped out – the SGCI team waited at a house in St. John’s owned by an SGCI employee. They were called back to AtlanticCo’s office, expecting a second round of presentations. That’s when they were told the good news: They had already won.
“If the naming contest seemed hurried, developing the campaign was enough to drive anyone around the bend”
“We were looking for an agency that was quick and nimble, that’s certainly where SGCI nailed it,” Mr Lever says. “They didn’t miss a lick.”
For SGCI, the craziness was just starting however. Having won the pitch, it now had to scramble to put the campaign into play. But there was surprise around the corner that nobody had foreseen.
Of the four names submitted, AtlanticCo was most fond of Aliant. (It, in fact, wasn’t one of the names originally submitted; Corporate Communications had proposed Alient, but people weren’t sure how to pronounce it, and some thought it looked too much like Alien, so it was changed.)
Problem was, a Nebraska telecommunications company was already using the name Aliant, a crucial fact that had been missed, for whatever reason, in the earlyt legal searches. So, as June 1 loomed, SGCI had to generate a list of alternate names. (These weren’t much better than their earlier efforts. A sample: Marix, Portis, and Pharos.) Luckily, it did not need any of them. The Nebraska-based Aliant, which is in the process of being taken over by another company and will soon change its name, agreed to sell the right to the moniker to AtlanticCo for about $50,000, sources say.
With a name finally in hand, SGCI began to prepare for the launch. Wanting to reach investors on Bay Street, it bought two-page spreads in the The Globe and and Mail and National Post that looked like actual stock tables. The ads bade “farewell” to the four regional telecoms and “hello” to Aliant, announcing the new name, Web site (www.aliant.ca) and the stock symbol (AIT). Different two-page ads ran in 14 dailies in Atlantic Canada, in both French and English.
The launch, which had an estimated budget of $500,000, included other elements such as Internet banner ads, a video that was shown to employees from the four companies, and a 12-page brochure that workers could take home.
After putting in five straight 90-hour weeks, you’d think Mr. Gardiner would be ready for a holiday. But last week, he tackled yet another supremely daunting task: cleaning up the mountain of paper that was threatening to bury his desk.