Last fall’s announcement from WPP that it would merge VMLY&R with Wunderman Thompson to form VML left big questions unanswered in Canada, where Taxi operated instead of VMLY&R. Important questions like would the Taxi brand disappear?
That was answered this week: Taxi will not disappear entirely, though it will be scaled back to two offices, in Montreal and New York, with Taxi’s Vancouver and Toronto offices converted to VML Canada.
Type1, the bespoke agency created for VW with Taxi and Wunderman Thompson, will also remain.
Former Taxi CEO Rob Guenette will take on the role of CEO of VML Canada, overseeing a roster of clients including Coca-Cola, Rogers Communications, CircleK/Couche Tarde, Colgate-Palmolive, OLG, Canada Life, HSBC, IKEA, and Microsoft.
VML’s global CMO Jon Cook said that he and Guenette got to know each other very well over the past 10-plus years as agency leaders within Y&R Group, and knew early in the merger process he wanted Guenette to be CEO.
“It has to be this equal trilogy of somebody who believes in the work, the business and the culture,” said Cook. “It'd be really easy to find somebody that could be one of those three things, but that would be an incomplete role, and Rob embodies all three of those in the perfect balance to me.”
Vaishali Sarkar, previously president with Wunderman Thompson Canada, will continue as president, VML Canada.
Other key leadership roles in the new VML will be filled by:
•Graham Lang, chief creative officer;
•Christine Maw, chief strategy officer;
•Emma Toth, as chief client officer; and
•Matt Shoom-Kirsh, as chief operating officer.
Ari Elkouby, who had been CCO at Wunderman Thompson, also remains with the new VML as chief creative officer on “one big client,” said Guenette, though he declined to say which one. The executive team is more weighted to former Taxi execs, but the overall leadership group will be fully integrated, said Guenette. Lang has also been appointed to the 15-person global creative board for VML.
Taxi is inarguably one of Canada’s most successful ad agency brands ever, earning a reputation for world-class creative in the late 90s and through the first decade of the century. While its influence may have waned somewhat after its acquisition by WPP in 2010, it remains a top agency in the country and its influence felt well beyond its offices in the many creative leaders who spent time there and are now spread out across the industry.
Taxi’s unique position in the market for WPP goes back to the 2015 move to fold Y&R into Taxi. When WPP merged Y&R with VML globally in 2018, Taxi was retained, and any VMLY&R business or staff operated under Taxi.
The decision to keep Taxi Montreal and New York—both of which will report into VML Canada—was made for two very different reasons, said Guenette.
New York was purely for a “client focused rationale.” That office, which Taxi opened in 2004, has clients like Mohegan Sun and Ferraro Rocher, who chose Taxi specifically because it had a “small agency” feel within WPP.
“Those clients we felt would be better served because that's why they came to Taxi… they really made a conscious decision to go to a smaller shop that didn't have to be independent,” said Guenette.
The future of the agency will also be determined by client needs and interest, he said. “I’m sure Jon will be poking me once in a while saying ‘Listen, do we still need Taxi in New York or not.”
But while client concerns were similarly an important consideration in Montreal, the larger factor was the agency’s proud Quebec legacy.
“The main reason we kept Taxi Montreal is because Taxi was founded in Montreal, [and] born in Montreal has a real Quebec resonance,” said Guenette. “And I wanted to make sure that as we transition this company to a bigger, more integrated thing, that we didn't lose the soul of our business in Quebec.”
The objective of VMLY&R / Wunderman Thompson was to create one new “contemporary” name globally, said Cook, but there are exceptions in each of its four regions: North America, LATAM, EMEA and APAC.
“The VML brand is flexible enough and confident and mature enough to be able to have exceptions to the name,” he said. At the same time, they knew they needed to close Taxi Toronto for VML to succeed.
“We have to have a strong VML in Canada, we wouldn’t want Canada be the one exception where the brand was different,” he said.
While Guenette has been in the industry for nearly 40 years, and an executive at Taxi for nearly 20, he said he did not hesitate when Cook asked him to take on something new.
“In fact, I will say that this change that we're going through now has rebooted my interest in the industry… it's almost like I've been recharged in a way.”
When WPP announced that VML would finally replace JWT, Y&R and Wunderman last fall, some around the industry criticized the holding company for turning its back on such historic agency brands.
But both Cook and Guenette say the new VML is about the future, bringing together the creative legacy of the older creative agencies—including Taxi—with the deep data and technology expertise that made VML a success.
“I would like to be the first agency in Canada, and maybe North America, to successfully combine high-level creativity with high-level data, high-level tech,” said Guenette. “Where Accenture has failed, where Deloitte hasn't figured it out, I want us to be that. I want us to be the first to achieve that.”
