It’s official. The doors of Garneau Wurstlin Philp, the long-rumored new creative shop headed by advertising luminaries Philippe Garneau, Michael Wurstlin and Bruce Philp, will open May 6 on the second floor of Gee Jeffery’s digs on King Street.

More than just shared space, Gee Jeffery is a minority partner in the new operation, which synergizes the talents of the three former Vickers & Benson executives and has tongues wagging that the arrangement could give Gee Jeffery a leg up in its competition with bcp for the $11 million-plus Canadian Airlines account. The prize is scheduled to be awarded mid-May.

The agency comes together with no accounts in place, although it’s already pitching, says Garneau. Blending his writing prowess with Wurstlin’s artistic sensibilities and Philp’s strategic skills, the new shop will focus on what Garneau calls ‘brand engineering.’

Although advertising will be their primary tool, branding is the strategy that the company hopes to grow by and it will be more involved than just a series of edgy tv commercials, print and radio ads, Garneau explains.

‘Advertising is just what branding clothes itself in. It will always make sense to keep advertising at the center, but we’re going to be involved in developing long-term strategies that build an identity for the product or the company bigger than what can be accomplished by a single campaign. If the work doesn’t contribute to growing the brand, then it’s not our stuff.’

What exactly other brand-building activities will consist of isn’t crystal yet. Typically people say the Internet or some such thing, but Garneau says there’s other, new ground to be broken.

‘I don’t have a crystal ball, but I know it’s not business as usual. There are going to have to be changes in how we do advertising when people are able to watch their tv programs whenever they want to. We want to be in a position to create some of those changes.’

While some will be surprised at Gee Jeffery as the choice for backer, Garneau says the agency’s skills at sales-driven advertising with a specialty in fast, targeted retail communication made it an ideal match. The idea was to find a company that complemented Garneau Wurstlin Philp, one with a different specialty, so the whole is greater than the individual companies and the new group isn’t simply a branch plant of a bigger player.

The relationship will be separate and autonomous, but the powers that be at each will help the other on pitches, says Garneau. ‘It’s a bit like a marriage; you work out the details as you go, but we intend to be of use to them and them useful to us.’

The fee strategy will be a bit left of center, based on compensation for concept and ideas rather than on placement of the ads, the traditional approach to business, says Garneau.

‘In the past, agencies have given away the idea for the commercial when what you should be paid for is the idea, the thing that has the most value, and not the thing that is process-driven. Breakthrough, edgy advertising should just be a given, a piece of the overall strategy for the company that says this is what we’re about, like Nike or Bank of Montreal.’

As for additions to the new agency, no new employees are being scouted yet, but when they’re looking to expand, they’ll be growing in teams of three, says Garneau. ‘It’s what we saw when we worked together on Bank of Montreal six months ago – each partner with a different expertise was just as valuable to the other’s discipline, so we’re going to stay with the pod concept.’

The answer to why now is simply timing, personal and cosmic. The millennium is coming, an energy begging for new ideas. Garneau at 36, Philp at 37, and Wurstlin at 40, employ a shared ‘no regrets’ life philosophy and were ready to move.

‘We’re incredibly excited about the whole thing.’

Bessie battles

Nobody’s screaming to spend a weekend locked in a room watching an endless stream of commercials, but by all reports, judging the Bessies was a delight.

Running under the dry, gut-funny wit of chair Tom Nelson, the hours of spot watching culminated in some high-energy cat fights, not the least of which was reportedly the battle over Campaign Bronze, ‘More stuff’ for Pillsbury Pizza Pops through Leo Burnett.

Apparently half thought the squirting ovals of self-contained ‘za were ‘puerile, in bad taste and spoke down to the audience.’ The other half agreed, but said that was exactly what the target market is all about, and therefore it’s brilliant. ‘The arguing was fabulous,’ says one observer. ‘People were just clawing at each other.’

Butting out, Piche style

The gelatinous, pathetic creature that is the recent ex-smoker ready to sell his soul for a butt: unless the idea is turning the stomachs of the tv audience with a display of quivering human weakness, not usually first casting choice. But when the product is Nicorette nicotine gum and you need a guy like this, well, it’s apparently ably left to the sensuous dexterities of director Jean-Marc Piche and dop Simon Mestel to replace a distasteful taboo (ciggies) with an infinitely more palatable one (sex), and sell the product in the process.

The fine cut for SMW Advertising’s stylish new Nicorette spot was screened for hmr clients recently at Daily Post, while jocular mugging for Citytv’s MediaTelevision cameras, good-natured ribbing and dutiful chuckling abounded.

‘For this screening we’ll keep our clothes on,’ quipped comm.bat’s Piche, the spot’s photogenic director to the camera and to the group of bespectacled clients looking on. (Off camera, a prolonged debate between Piche and the MediaTelevision crew follows the screening regarding the myth versus reality of the stereotypical hyper-sexual French-Canadian creative, which Piche insists is mere cliche, but we digress.)

The noirish-toned spot, from smw writer Neil Morgan, creative director David Sharpe and art director Ken Morgan, opens in the interior of a bar, where a camera cuts to a number of sultry babes sucking with death-defying sensuality on cigarettes, shooting smoldering looks and languidly letting shoes slip to the floor.

All the while our protagonist sits at the bar surveying the scenery, growing jumpier by the second, the visuals punctuated with close-ups of sweat droplets forming on his face and a drink spilling from jittery hands.

‘You’re bound to be tempted,’ says the voice-over as, reaching breaking point, he rushes out into the rainy street, driven by – what? Frustrated libido? The answer comes when, like manna, a pack of soul- and lung-saving Nicorette falls end over end from the sky into his withdrawal-weary hands. Whew.

A challenge in creating the Nicorette spot was to maintain a degree of suspense, not immediately giving away the gist of the spot, says Piche, who credits Mestel with delivering the desired overall Casablanca-inspired feel, a contemporary yet ’50s type film. The spot was given an nearly-but-not-quite sepia tone look, with the actresses lit from above a la screen goddesses of the ’50s.

Shooting took place over two nights in Miami, with club scenes located at the subtly named Bang bar.

The spot was edited by Daily Post’s Wendy Linton. comm.bat producer for the spot was Jane Thomson, executive producer was Mark Bisson, agency producer was Carlo D’Ercole.

Panic & Bobbing

The component parts of new editing facility Panic & Bob, Andy Ames, David Baxter and David Hicks, ex of Partners’ Post, and executive producer Janice May, formerly of Command Post, have been busily handling projects as well as putting together the stylish new office space at 567 Queen West. Each editor was given licence to interpret his own suite in the easy-on-the-eyes, 5,000-square-foot space. (Baxter’s relaxed suite is known as the ‘up country’ room.)

The facility houses three Avids, with a fourth planned, and has been handling projects from Molson Dry, Bell and Maxwell House, with a Tragically Hip video slated. p&b will be actively pursuing business as a fully separate entity from Partners’, with whom no final arrangement has been signed.

Bummed out

Some art-imitates-life creative is hounding ad execs in Vancouver via bbdo’s latest dead-funny spot for Yellow Pages.

Directed by Avion Films’ Bruce Hurwit, the scene opens with a Material Girl-esque chorus of smiling tuxedoed gentlemen singing and dancing their way up a freestanding white staircase in the middle of a fuchsia stage. Strains of Broadway music pump in. Cosy so far, except they’re wearing toilet seats around their necks.

Then the cancan starts and with it a rousing tune that begins, ‘If you want some comfort, because your bum hurts,’ ending with the men standing on chairs bending over for the camera with yellow happy faces in an appropriate spot for the product, Happy Butt Ointment.

Cut to the red-faced client in a director’s chair with an agency type on either side. ‘Well sir, what’d you think?’ asks one excitedly while the other looks on expectantly and grins like a maniac. Yellow Pages comes zooming in, inlaid over the client’s face and flipping open to ‘A.’ Tight zoom on the Advertising Agencies column.

A second Yellow Pages spot, also directed by Hurwit, will air later this month.

Mestel and McLean together again

Tom McLean, that is, and Alan Mestel, who is exiting Zoo to become the newest addition to the Revolver director roster.

In bigger industry news, maybe it’s some kind of economy gauge, maybe just the bandwagon effect, but there’s an increasing whack of advertising folk trekking to Cannes at the end of June for the advertising festival.

To date, those Cannes-bound include reps from MacLaren McCann, bbdo, Saatchi & Saatchi, Radke Films, comm.bat and Avion Films. Says one production house rep contemplating the impact on the gold Amex, ‘There’s the feeling that if you don’t go, nothing bad will happen, and if you do go, something good could happen.’

On the awards front, Big Star Motion Pictures in Toronto picked up a Gold Award at Worldfest in Houston for its Giacomo Moncada-directed music video for The Neilsons. Competition ran to 45 countries and included over 4,000 entries.

Look for some changes at Dalton Films in the next couple of months.

Post shoots for Maxwell House, Cheerios, and a day before a job for Bounty, Dalton exec Chris Dalton says rumors that the company is in trouble are obviously without substance. But he, along with freelance producer Ken Eggett and director David Straiton, are looking into a ‘redesign’ of the company and ‘thinking about hiring some people we haven’t thought of hiring before.’

In other Dalton news, exec Cindy Kemp has gone on sabbatical as of the end of April and is expected to return at the end of the summer.