He is perhaps one of the most overlooked creative minds in Canadian advertising. His name is not engraved on the dozens of awards his agency has won in the last decade, but ask any creative who has passed through the doors of Palmer Jarvis DDB, and they will tell you that success of the shop since the early 1990s and the vision of Ron Woodall are inextricably linked.

For much of the last decade PJ has been at the top of virtually every advertising award show in Canada. The shop also pulled in a pair of Cannes Lions last June thanks to the agency’s work with Bud Light. The shop won Strategy Magazine’s agency of the year honors in 1999, 2000, 2001. If it were a sports franchise the word dynasty would often be mentioned in connection with Palmer Jarvis.

Perhaps most amazing of all is it accomplished this despite the regular defections of top creatives who went on to key positions at other agencies.

This success is no accident, says Woodall, winner of the Spiess Award at this year’s Bessies (p. S-9). ‘If you set your standards so that you won’t let anything out that isn’t a potential award winner, then you are going to do great advertising,’ he says. ‘There is a close correlation between effective advertising and award-winning advertising and that has always been so.’

Woodall may not have been the first to recognize that link, but he helped demonstrate how the theory can successfully be put to practice and helped nudge Canadian advertising up several notches.

Although Woodall has stepped back from his role at PJ, the advertising industry in Canada is better for his efforts. He helped raise the bar and the industry en masse is producing top-level creative. The ball is surely rolling toward even greater feats in the future.

I mention this here, because in the past two months in the face of a SARS outbreak in Toronto, we have become aware of just how important a strong and vibrant domestic industry is to the well being of business as a whole. While foreign work ground to a halt through April, there was enough local work to keep businesses afloat.

It was not always thus. For years, the dependency on foreign work and the skills of foreign directors was the core of commercial production in Canada and no one gave it a second thought.

But thanks to the efforts of agencies such as PJ, Taxi Advertising, Zig Advertising, Rethink, Bensimon*Byrne, MacLaren McCann and others, Canada is pumping out winning work and seeing results in the market.

Canadian directors have been among the key beneficiaries of this, with many of the best jobs being awarded to homegrown talent, including Martin Granger who this year has repeated with a best in series Bessie for his direction on ‘Ulterior Emotions’ from PJ.

But even as the SARS epidemic recedes, a potentially greater threat is looming on the horizon. April also saw the Canadian dollar pass the 70-cent mark and hit its highest level since 1998. Epidemics come and go, but a strong Canadian dollar could result in the devastation of the domestic industry.

The industry’s best bet is to continue nurturing homegrown work. It won’t offset the losses but it could stave off complete collapse.