It won Fuji Film (a former Ammirati client) and Family Channel in December and signed on Scott Paper's $3.8 million business early this year.

John St. president Arthur Fleischmann, who had occupied that role at Ammirati, formed the new agency in July with creative directors Stephen Jurisic and Angus Tucker, director of planning Emily Bain, director of client services Jane Tucker and backing from Toronto holding company Envoy Communications. Along with the account wins, the agency recently added a highly touted creative team, writer Chris Taciuk and art director Dave Federico, formerly of Roche Macauley & Partners.

Fleischmann says the new venture gave him and the creatives an opportunity to focus on the work rather than the business of running an agency. "Individually we were coming to the conclusion that our jobs were becoming less and less about doing the advertising and more and more about the management process and the business of advertising," says Fleischmann. "And that was somehow less exciting and motivating."

Fleischmann and the CDs had originally been approached by Envoy to lead a new Leagas Delaney outpost during Envoy's play for that agency; while that deal was unconsummated, Envoy charged ahead with plans for a new shop with Fleischmann et al.

While the team thought deeply about the place for a new agency in the Canadian ad scene, Fleischmann says the small yet experience-dense nature of the shop makes it a relevant addition to the market. "It's unusual to get this breadth of senior people working directly on clients' business. We have five very senior people who have worked together between five and 13 years." Fleischmann also cites the agency's strategic emphasis and creative output: "I think all three of those things are interlinked; they're not three separate thoughts," says Fleischmann. "The creative output that comes from that level of seniority and that kind of planning model gives us creative that is not only interesting and exciting but very strongly strategically rooted so that the work is about long term creative campaigns, not interesting one-off executions."

Tucker also points to the shop's strong strategic bent, maintaining "if the strategy isn't creative, the creative won't be.

"We (us and our client) spend a lot of time making sure the strategy is right before we start showing them creative ideas. When everybody's bought into the strategy, it makes selling good work a hell of a lot easier.

In fact, you don't really have to sell at all when the client feels as much ownership of the strategy as you do."

Jurisic and Tucker had been responsible for much of the highly acclaimed work coming out of Ammirati. The duo worked on the Fuji business, orchestrating the Open Your Eyes campaign (see Boards cover, July 2001), encouraging creative expression. They had also spearheaded award-winning campaigns for Clarica and Lipton in addition to Labatt's Out of the Blue series, which depicted the joys of extemporaneous adventure. Federico and Taciuk, who won a place last year at the Cannes Young Creatives contest, are known for award-winning efforts for Ikea, as well as creative for Mercedes.

Tucker summarizes: "We just want to be a terrific place for people to come to work. If that's the case, the best people will want to work here and the clients will come."

The departure of John St.'s founders augured ill for Ammirati, which was hit by a string of account losses toward the end of the year. The agency, long known as a solid creative player, lost its flagship Labatt beer assignments in November (see Grip, pg. 22), and thereafter split with Fuji, food store chain Loblaw's, Canada Bread and Sears (which the agency resigned).