Canada Post has chosen The&Partnership as its lead communications agency, working with Junction59 for direct marketing work and Tank for French language work.
The three agencies worked together to pitch for the business.
The assignment includes all aspects of communications, from strategy to execution across digital, social, direct and traditional. Long-time creative agency agency Publicis will continue to work on Canada Post’s brand strategy, identity and design evolution, through Ove Design, while Touché has been awarded media planning and buying.
“The&Partnership came to the table with a unique approach to modern marketing, exemplified by its partnership model,” said Rod Hart, Canada Post’s chief customer and marketing officer. “They also demonstrated a genuine passion for our business and share a clear cultural affinity with our team. We’re excited by their creativity and fresh ideas, and we look forward to what’s ahead with great anticipation.”
The&Partnership president Christopher Andrews said that unique approach includes building teams across disciplines with a shared bottom line. “Where that benefits the client is it takes away any sense of territorialism.
“What we have proven ourselves to be very good at is uniting not just the disciplines on the agency side, but also working within complex client organizations to help kind of streamline their marketing process as well.”
While The&Partnership embeds agency teams with some clients, Andrews said that would not be the case with Canada Post. “We’re not talking about that right now,” he said.
The Canada Post review came under fire from the Institute of Communication Agency’s Pitch Watchdog earlier this year, with the ICA calling for agencies to boycott the review just days before the call for entries were due. The&Partership is not a member of the ICA, and Andrews declined to say much about the Watchdog concerns, saying only that the review was “a very robust process.”
“We were pleased with the response to the RFP and are looking forward to working with our new partners,” said Jon Hamilton, general manager, communications strategy with Canada Post. “Over the years, we have had the privilege of working with some of the best agencies in the business and are happy with the most recent outcome. Our RFP process opened in February of this year and followed our high procurement standards as a crown corporation to ensure we provide a process that is open, robust and fair.”
