For those who haven't heard about it despite the media coverage it generated, YUL-Lab is the name given to a new concept meant to generate business for Montreal-based advertising agencies.
It's one more step in the quest to offer the services of Québec ad agencies to marketers outside the province. Doing so is not only critical to the future of the industry in Québec, it also lets national, North American and global marketers tap into an incredibly talented pool of creative and new media talent. And it further positions Montreal as a creative city. It’s a point I argued in an article on Montreal’s brand identity published in Infopresse in 2006 in which I quoted Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, who conducted a study on Montreal.
It's perhaps no surprise that one of the member agencies of the AAPQ (Quebec’s association of advertising agencies) most closely associated with the launch of the YUL-Lab is run by the former president of Montreal's Chamber of Commerce Isabelle Hudon. Her agency, Marketel, has long thought of itself as a national agency that just happens to be in Montreal. Ms. Hudon was recently interviewed in Les Affaires where she delivered a message about the urgent need to seek business on the international stage. I should add that it's also likely not a coincidence that the two advertisers who have most enthusiastically supported the YUL-Lab so far are Marketel clients; Mastercard and L'Oreal.
Montreal-based agencies such as Cossette, Sid Lee, Taxi and others have already done so. I have no doubt that Quebec agencies can be a tremendous resource by applying their know-how in markets outside Québec. Just as I once worked for a Toronto shop that handled Ikea Germany's advertising from Toronto, Québec agencies can develop marketing-communications solutions for the world. And the same can of course be said of agencies in Minneapolis or Portland that handle national or global accounts.
What is the YUL-Lab?
The Montreal.ad website defines it this way:
The YUL-LAB fulfills new needs. It was created to reinvent advertising. A unique experimentation lab, it was designed for international brands to help them develop new predictive and reliable advertising models that will later be exported. The Lab allows global brands to test all possible advertising combinations because it converts ideas into reality while measuring results and predicting success. The lab optimizes Montreal as a cultural microcosm and provides advertisers with a realistic environment for experimenting new advertising models that can later be reproduced anywhere in the world.
Metropolitan Montreal is unique. It is home to an infinite range of media opportunities. It is founded on human and material capabilities, academic and intellectual resources as well as creative resources that allow experimentation with target groups that represent numerous cultures and languages. Montreal possesses all the essential assets of a perfect human laboratory to help brands build predictive advertising models. The goal is to discover and test new methods that reliably predict success or failure.
Montreal as a testing ground or a test market?
There is no doubt that Montreal can be a lab or a testing ground allowing marketers to experiment at a relatively low cost. And it’s an environment that is more controlled as it is somewhat more insulated from media messages from other markets spilling into the ‘lab’ – an element that was particularly important to Mastercard, according to an article published last week in the Globe & Mail.
However, suggesting that it allows marketers to test ‘new advertising models that can later be reproduced anywhere in the world’ or ‘reliably predict success or failure’ is not only a stretch, it goes against everything Québec advertising agencies have been preaching to marketers outside Québec for half a century.
I am not denying the fact that Montreal is increasingly multicultural. My point is about the ‘predictive’ nature of a test conducted in Montreal and the claim that its results can then be ‘reproduced anywhere in the world’. It simply is not true. I concede that there might be specific cases where a successful campaign’s media mix and messaging will be equally successful in other markets but it’s the exception rather than the rule.
Throwing the baby with the bath water.
We can debate semantics about ‘testing ground’ and ‘test market’ and I don’t claim to be an expert research methodologist. However, it’s the message it sends to marketers outside Québec that I worry about.
In the same article in Les Affaires, Yanik Deschênes, the head of the Québec advertising agencies association, is quoted: (the translation is mine) “Until now, the Québec approach, with its cultural specificity, has helped the development of the creative sector. It’s time to move to the second phase; selling our know-how outside the borders of Québec.” That’s bang on. But by adding that Montreal can be a predictive test market, the promoters of the YUL-Lab are, perhaps unwittingly, also denying Québec’s difference. And it’s the very difference that helped build its advertising industry during the ‘first phase’ to borrow from Mr. Deschênes.
I’m a strong believer that Québec agencies can compete globally without rejecting Québec's uniqueness. While I recognize that there’s a new generation of advertising professionals that don’t care much about Bouchard’s thirty-six responsive chords and view the world as their oyster, they should perhaps weight the risks associated with watering down the distinctiveness in order to play in a bigger sandbox.
Valuable learning.
If the YUL-Lab is in fact about testing and learning, its promoters should perhaps adjust their message prior to heading to Chicago to pitch the idea to marketers south of the border. They should learn from the two comments below – one was posted on the Globe & Mail's site and the other on Ad Age’s site.
-----
For three decades, Québec ad agencies quoted Jacques Bouchard, the late, great founder of BCP advertising and author of a seminal book entitled "Les 36 cordes sensibles des Québécois" detailing 36 “responsive chords” that are different for consumers in Francophone Québec than in the rest of Canada. The book promoted ads being created in Québec for the Québec market vs. being translated from the English in Toronto or New York. Marketers and English-language ad agencies bowed to their superior market knowledge and acknowledged that a lot of ad campaigns that had succeeded in English Canada had bombed in Quebec. Now the same agencies are telling the world that Québec is a perfect test market for world campaigns and that anything that flies in Québec will pool out successfully worldwide. My question is: Are they lying now or have they been lying for the last 30 years? If the latter, a lot of marketers are going to want their money back for ad campaigns unnecessarily created in Québec for the Québec market. If the former, a lot of marketers are going to want their money back when they end up with ad campaigns that bomb in every world market but Québec. Chances are, the truth lies somewhere in between but I doubt if that’s going to be part of these agencies’ pitch.
-----
I know the world has changed, but for 20 something years Québec agencies have presented to every English speaking client who would listen, that to succeed in Québec the market is so unique and different that you must create original French work to succeed. If just adapting English ads into French won't work, how then does creating original French campaigns now translate worldwide? Cirque du Soleil has a well-deserved reputation for leaving audiences in disbelief, but perhaps this is one for even its most gifted performers to juggle well.
The AAPQ may claim that these folks don’t understand what the YUL-Lab is truly about. Or perhaps they’re getting hung-up on that one sentence in the concept being ‘tested’: the part about ‘reliably predicting success or failure’.
I’m willing to predict YUL-Lab’s success if that claim is removed from the YUL-Lab’s promise.
Comments