CANADA: One Twenty Three West Vancouver

Named for the longtitude of its beloved HQ, Vancouver, new agency One Twenty Three West is a small outfit in a city of lowly budgets, but highly creative folk. It proudly offers low-cost solutions, operating out of a garage and coming up with ‘simple smarts’ – easy as 123

You only have visit their website – 123w.ca – to see that One Twenty Three West is an agency unlike most others. Click on the ‘about’ button and instead of the usual, slightly bland, black-on-white copy referring to things like contemporary thinking, creative outlooks and media neutrality there is, instead, a selection of people singing (though I use the term advisedly) about the agency, or body popping as relevant information appears on screen. Click on the partners’ information on the site and more random people pop up talking, in unusual settings and in unusual ways, about the person in question, from a horse racing commentator reeling off Bryan Collins’ CV to a faux-political announcement about Rob Sweetman’s credentials as a creative. The site is a world away from some of the more corporate agency offerings and was created, for minimal cost, through fiverr.com, an online marketplace offering a whole variety of services that all cost $5.

At first site

On the phone from Vancouver, the aforementioned Sweetman (creative director/art director, above far right), Collins (creative director/copywriter, above second from left) and the third of four partners Jeff Harrison (creative director/designer, second from right. The fourth partner is business director Scot Keith) laugh at my amazement, and slight bafflement, at their site. “Yeah, it’s a little bit different,” says Sweetman. “Well, a lot different actually. But it’s strategic and smart at the same time and we wanted to do something different, something that no other agency has done. We wanted to get noticed and have clients pick up the phone and call us.” The site also reflects 123w’s belief in collaboration and cost effectiveness. Another example of this is the agency’s headquarters; Harrison’s garage. “I built this garage from scratch,” says Harrison proudly. “And I stood in it and thought, ‘you know, this would make a great base for a studio’. It’s completely wired, all the servers are hooked up, there’s plenty of power. You know, it saves us a ton of money but it also saves the client money too. There’s no big overhead for a huge office downtown and [the clients] are happy when they come here, they think it’s great. It’s relieving for them to realise we’re not some huge corporation that’s all about extravagance.”

123w opened its doors in April of this year and the four founder partners were, and still are, the only full-time members of staff. The agency was born out of the partners’ frustrations with more traditional agency life and with traditional corporate structure, which points to why their new company eschews anything that resembles the usual commercial practices. Eight years ago Sweetman, Collins and Harrison all worked together at Canadian agency Rethink. Sweetman and Collins moved on to work together at Cossette then opened Dare Digital in Vancouver while Harrison remained at Rethink before they all reunited, along with Keith, to form 123w. “All four of us had frustrations with how the agency world, especially those that are publicly owned, operates,” explains Collins. “Frustration with the lack of logic and simple smarts that we all wanted to see. So we all got together and spent months and months talking about our frustrations and our passions and came up with a business model that’s very different.”

A thoroughly modern model

The team likens the traditional agency approach to the old Hollywood system of the 50s where studios owned huge lots, massive costume departments and had a cavalcade of highly paid but often underused stars on their books. “They realised it wasn’t financially sustainable,” continues Collins, “and it wasn’t the right way to get the most creativity for any given project so they moved to a system where there was a small core team, then built on the team according to the project. So that’s what we do.”

This structure, believes the team, enables the agency to be fluid and nimble and gives them the ability to work with the best people for the job and not limit themselves to a selection of people on staff. It is, says Collins, “freedom of creativity”. 123w isn’t the only agency to employ this or a similar method of working and the team are aware of this, but also state that, at the moment, not enough people use it, though they believe it will become a much more dominant structure in the future. “I think [this model] is going to increase in popularity,” says Sweetman, “because more and more people are realising that the old ways aren’t sustainable.” The agency offers a diverse range of services from strategic planning and brand management to consumer research and project management, with all of the teams working on those services built from the ground up with Sweetman et al at the heart of the operation. “And, you know, it saves [the client] a lot of money too,” continues Sweetman, “because we’re only paying for the talent that they really need. We bring in specialists that we can tailor specifically to their account and we work collaboratively with the client from the beginning.”

Evolving into a blank canvas

The team at 123w also believes that it’s what clients – certainly their own clients – want because it puts them at the heart of the creative conversation and allows them to work alongside the agency rather than be on the outside looking in. “It’s not for everybody,” says Sweetman. “This model typically works for clients that want to be hands-on and want to work with the creative teams, sit beside them and help solve things.” That was one of the main gripes they had in previous jobs, that the levels of permission and approval just served to muddy the waters and dilute the work. “You know, we work with a lot of clients who’re a bit smaller and really need success,” adds Collins, “and it’s relieving to work with people who really want and need innovation, they want to get in there and roll their sleeves up with you.” One of the agency’s bigger accounts is underwear brand Saxx and the team cites them as a perfect example of how a client and agency can collaborate across a range of issues. “We’ve worked on TV spots with them,” explains Harrison, “but we’ve also worked on product design, we’ve worked on their website, we’ve worked on email direct marketing. Every piece of their business we sit down with them to talk about [and] we try to make their dollars go really far.”

But it’s not only the smaller companies that are turning to agencies such as 123w. The trio reveal that even they have been surprised at the clients who have approached them about working together, such as Google, who are open to working within a non-traditional agency model. Part of the reason for that, they think, is because recent years have seen such a cross-pollination of staff that many clients are populated with ex-agency staff, and vice-versa. The pools of knowledge have become mixed and there’s less trepidation about how the different processes work, and therefore more understanding of how they can be altered and improved.

Advertising as a whole has, they think, got much more interesting and exciting in recent years. Illustrated by the fact that 123w doesn’t limit itself to any one medium or creative plan, the industry has evolved into much more of a blank canvas approach, which Sweetman, Collins and Harrison revel in. “You know, it used to be, when I first started in this industry, that clients wanted a poster, a TV script, a radio script and that was pretty much it,” says Sweetman. “Now we can be sitting around a table with a client just talking about business issues or problems and potential opportunities for them. And [the solution] might be a suggestion to change their product in some way, or alter the shipping of it, or change the sales cycle to spread out the sales and change the customer flow. So, it’s more about problems and solving those problems than it is about specific mediums, and we get really excited about that.”

Tall mountains, short budgets

When asked whether being based in Vancouver has any impact on their work, or in any way differentiates them – and other Vancouver-based agencies – from their Toronto counterparts, Sweetman is quick to reply. “It absolutely does,” he states. “I think we’re blessed in a lot of ways. We have the mountains, we have great skiing and that lifestyle attracts a lot of quality people here. People move here for the lifestyle even though they could make a lot more money in Toronto; our talent pool is really rich. Also, it’s a small market so there are not a lot of big budgets, it’s sort of a do-it-yourself community that’s very creative and which figures things out. I think the clients are a little braver out here too and it makes for a really interesting market.”

The founders’ love of Vancouver is reflected in the agency’s name, which is the longitude of the city. “We talked a lot about the name,” laughs Collins. “The naming process is extremely hard but we thought; we’re all from Vancouver, it’s a Vancouver agency, we love working here, we love the clients out West and we don’t have an agency in Toronto that we have to feed things through, so it’s the idea that our creativity comes from being here. Also,” he adds in conclusion, “just the whole ‘123’ thing had a nice simplicity to it.”