I never worked at Taxi, but I had an over 30-year relationship with them.
It began in 1992, when I saw a billboard that simply read, “Pizza.” But the two “z’s” in pizza had been replaced with McDonald’s signature golden arches.
No McDonald’s logo. No shot of the pizza. No tagline. Even the Golden Arches were cocked at a 45-degree angle. (“Yeah, we hear you brand standards, but we’re doing it anyway.”) It was as stripped down a piece of advertising as I’d ever seen, and it demanded your attention. If an ad could ever be described as grabbing you by the throat, shoving you up against a wall and taking your money, that board was it.
But when I saw it, my first thought was not “Huh. McDonald’s has pizza”, it was “Who TF did that billboard?” It looked that different. I was also on the verge of making the leap from account service into creative, so maybe that board inched me a little closer.
It was done by Cossette and art directed by Paul Lavoie who, with Jane Hope, would not long afterwards open a Montreal agency with a very weird name. In an era where every other ad agency put their name on the door—Ogilvy, Grey, J. Walter Thompson, Young & Rubicam (including cool kids like Fallon McElligott, Wieden & Kennedy, and Goodby, Silverstein, Berlin)—they called themselves Taxi, believing that the only number of people a client needed in a big meeting were as many as could fit into a cab.
Even their name was an idea.
And then they opened in Toronto, won a brand called Clearnet, and started doing this very strange, very fresh work featuring animals as a proxy for a wireless future that wasn’t scary and dystopian, but fun and friendly. They even got a young comic named Norm Macdonald to do a voiceover for one of them that featured a fly getting eaten by a Venus Flytrap—a metaphor for getting trapped into long-term fixed contracts offered by carriers like Bell and Rogers.
It’s hard to describe what that work felt like at the time, except that it didn’t feel like advertising. It was loose and unfussed over, with a soundtrack that sounded like a cross between humming and a kazoo. It was effortlessly cool, and by comparison made Bell and Rogers look not just old, but Dad jeans old.
That work evolved into the “Animals” campaign, and 30 years later, those animals are still around. Think of what they’ve gone through—Clearnet became Telus, for one, but they also survived multiple CEOs and CMOs, recessions, spectrum auctions, the digital revolution, smartphones, social media, and on and on. They. Would. Not. Die. Even when Taxi got fired (don’t get me started), and Telus went to a new agency, the Animals went with them. There’s an awards show now called the Immortal Awards, and this campaign must be what they meant when they named it.
We started John St. in 2001, just as Taxi really started rolling.
They seemingly won everything they pitched: Mini, Viagra, Koodo, Canadian Tire. What was infuriating was that many of their wins seemed to come without pitches. No sooner had we learned that Krispy Kreme was coming to Canada, we learned Taxi already had them. It was like the clients were pitching them.
When we won Harvey’s, our first “big” account, I think I was more excited to beat Taxi than I was to win Harvey’s. I simply couldn’t believe that we had won the final shootout with them. Paul Lavoie wrote us a note congratulating us on the win, which was very gracious and very Quebecois of him. (I am a sucker for manners.) He also said something to me when I bumped into him not long after: “Don’t worry about awards. Just focus on the work and the awards and accolades will come.” Truer words.
Taxi got their revenge a year later in another showdown for Canadian Tire.
It was John St., a three-year-old, 40-person agency against Taxi, a 140-person perennial Agency of the Year winner (at a time when there was only one AOY every year, not six). After the final pitch, I got the call from the client with the news.
There were a few pleasantries, a few “how was your weekends?” and then the big pause, the deep breath, and I knew it before the words were out of her mouth. The CMO said something that stuck with me on that call: “We loved both you guys, but we would have destroyed your agency’s culture. We are HUGE. And we just feel like Taxi could handle us.” She was right. They would have, and when we did win some monsters years later, we were ready.
But handle them Taxi did.
They inherited a brand known for doing what was, without question, THE worst advertising of the last decade—aka “The Canadian Tire guy.” He was a friendly neighbour with a tool shed the size of an airplane hangar, and a character so well-meaning and dorky he made the Simpsons’ Ned Flanders look like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. The first work that Taxi did for the brand accomplished something that was unthinkable only months earlier: it made creative people want to work on Canadian Tire.
Which is what always impressed me about Taxi.
They did their biggest and best work on their biggest clients, the ones that paid the bills. Which is not only the test of any great agency, but the best way to ensure our continued viability as an industry. Taxi was indisputably a creative-first agency, but I never needed to see an Effies case study to understand that their ideas worked. You felt it. It wasn’t creative for creative’s sake. It was creative for business’s sake, and it’s no wonder clients begged them to work on their business.
Their work on Mini was better than any other agency’s in the world—including the best agency in the world at the time, Crispin Porter Bogusky, which had the account in the U.S. That billboard with the Mini in the slingshot? Or when they stuck a Mini inside a metal cage with a sign on it that said: Please don’t feed, tease, or annoy the Mini. No agency in Canada has ever understood billboards better than Taxi.
Their Viagra work was a standout and an awards show darling for years. And to those who say, “who couldn’t do good stuff on Viagra?” please work on a piece of pharmaceutical business for a couple of months and let me know if you still feel the same way. It ain’t easy, and they did it year after year after year. And while there are too many great Viagra ads to mention, this particular one still kills me every time I watch it. Her “Bravo” is priceless.
I could keep going, because their “best of” list is as long as my arm—Boston Pizza’s “Terry Peters”, The World of Comedy’s “Catch ya later, flatulator,” Mio’s “Changes Everything,” Flow93.5’s billboards, Koodo’s “Fat Free Mobile” throwback… hey, I told you I could keep going.
But in the end, Taxi pushed clients to do bigger, braver, smarter, and more provocative work. In the process, it pushed the Canadian ad industry to do the same.
Which is a hell of a legacy.
Angus Tucker is co-founder and former chief creative officer at John St.
