[Top Agency Series] How To Grow by Leveraging Creative Agencies With Thomas Magny of Camden

Thomas Magny is the Partner and VP of Creation at Camden, a creative ad agency in Montreal, Toronto, Lyon, and Hong Kong for brands with drive. Camden has over 120 active B2C, B2B, and government clients across many different fields. Since joining the agency in 2019, Thomas has played an instrumental role in building Camden’s reputation in Toronto and winning clients across Canada. He previously served as Associate Creative Director at Felt Studio, a Montreal-based creative studio. He comes from the fashion and branding world, having built Bonvilain, an online clothing line that brought together innovative organic fabrics and a meticulous approach to detail.  

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [03:06] Thomas Magny talks about Camden 
• [04:33] Camden’s services and success stories
• [07:31] The major Camden milestones 
• [11:33] Thomas discusses Camden’s business model 
• [19:29] Tips for maintaining company’s culture 
• [22:41] The impetus of starting the Hong Kong office during the pandemic
• [25:38] How to expand into different regions
• [28:07] Thomas shares Camden’s ideal client profile

In this episode…

Scaling a business in today’s world requires a lot of creativity. However, not many brands have the creativity expertise in-house to help them thrive. So, what can you do to help your business grow? 

According to Thomas Magny, partnering with a creative agency is fundamental. They are professionals who can help you with services like branding, production, advertising, communication and design, media, marketing, and more — these are some of the things that most businesses struggle with. He shares how they are successfully growing their creative agency in multiple regions.

On this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Thomas Magny, Partner and VP of Creation at Camden, to discuss how brands can thrive through creative agencies. Thomas talks about Camden, its services, success stories, and business model, and how it maintains its business culture in different regions.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Thomas Magny on LinkedIn
• Camden

Special Mention(s):

• Second Bite Podcast
• Mathieu Bédard on LinkedIn
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
• Purple Cow, New Edition: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin

Related episode(s):

• “[Top Agency Series] Most Valuable Advice When Selling Your Agency With Todd Taskey of Potomac Business Capital” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Sweet Process Series] How to Save Hundreds of Hours a Month Using Top Productivity Tools with Adi Klevit of Business Success Consulting Group” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “Design should be at the service of the communication objective of your clients.”
• “If we need to convert, we need to talk to the right audience.”
• “To succeed, you need to understand what the clients want.”
• “Good enough is not enough.”

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22 

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today I’m here with Thomas from Camden. And Thomas before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes people should check out of the podcast. Since this is part of the top agency series, you can check out the one I did with Todd Taskey. Todd Taskey has the Second Bite Podcast but he basically helps pair private equity with agencies and helps agencies sell sometimes they make more on the second bite than they do on the first so that’s an interesting one we talked about valuation the landscape and everything else. So that’s a good one as well as Adi Klevit. Adi Klevit specializes in creating SOPs for companies so they can run efficiently properly and onboard staff et cetera. We geeked out on our favorite tools, Software Productivity stuff, which I always love. So that’s another good one to check out and many more on inspiredinsider.com and this episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to the dream 100 relationships and partnerships. How do we do that we actually help you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast we do the strategy, the accountability and the full execution. Thomas we call ourselves the magic elves that are running in the background to make it look easy for the company and the host so they can build great relationships create great content, but also run their business. For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships and I found no better way over the past decade to profile the people and companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you should if you have questions go to rise25.com I am excited to introduce Thomas Magny. He’s the VP creation of Camden and partner at the Toronto office. He comes from the fashion and branding world actually. And he’s built a clothing line for six years. His journey in the advertising world started around five years ago when he met the CEO of the network Mathieu. And Camden’s growing global network has four offices on three continents. They serve anyone from pharmaceutical companies, to b2b companies, to beverages to health and beauty to Puma and many, many more. So Thomas, thanks for joining me.

Thomas Magny 2:52 

Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. What a great intro with the elevator pitch and sponsor all in one well done.

Jeremy Weisz 3:01 

Thank you talk about Camden and what you do.

Thomas Magny 3:06 

Yeah, what is Camden? Well, first off, I think Camden is a collective of people around the world. Born local, and we’re basically United about our, I would say our belief, our shared belief in a diversity, disruption and creativity. Okay. So it’s really that kind of cultural aspect that I think it brings that uniqueness to Camden. As you said, Camden right now is four offices, and some new flagship sitting in is going to be announcing soon. So that’s pretty exciting actually. And something that is very important like to know about the Camden expansion as well is that we want to stay at a human scale, meaning that we want to stay agile, we want to keep a low headcount in every office, and really be able to serve our clients the same way. Everything that we do is custom and tailored to our client’s needs. So it really allows us to be hands on deck and never recreate the same formula for our clients. And I think that’s something that really appreciate about Camden.

Jeremy Weisz 4:14 

What are the services you offer? Let’s take Puma for example.

Thomas Magny 4:18 

Yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Weisz 4:19 

We’re looking here, if you’re listening the audio there is a video component here and we are looking at the Camden website you can find a camdenadvertising.com And we see here Puma basketball.

Thomas Magny 4:33 

The Puma was an interesting one, it’s a brand that we were so like, I mean, it’s a dream country to work with them. This has been managing by the Lyon’s office in France. But that kind of going back into a little bit like what kind of service Camden has offered Puma is a great example. But we have a 360 approach. We’re fully integrated agency, because we believe that I think, the brand experience is a connected journey, one that brings consistency and distinction, like across what a brand says what a brand does, and what it delivers, right. And we believe as well, that design should be at the service of the communication objective of our clients, we’re not the type of doing those creative ego trips, which sometimes it could be very, very, very tempting. But in the client side, we’re working with global brands, smaller, purposeful mandates for smaller companies, and really helping them making a difference in their markets. Here, like the Puma example was really, like an awareness campaign bringing them the new launch of the collection that they had and from the ground up doing the creative strategy with realizing this was amazing products very well. All this, the creative team in Lyon is killing it. It’s a success story of Camden. We’re really proud of them.

Jeremy Weisz 6:06 

Yeah, well, if the shoes can make me dunk like that, I’m gonna buy a pair tonight.

Thomas Magny 6:11 

Do you play basketball?

Jeremy Weisz 6:13 

Yeah, I do. Yeah, and if you’re looking at the video part, you can see where here you can see someone dunking the basketball here. And I love on your website, actually, how, when you go to the website, you’re looking at this, these features where like, if you go to the video, basically everywhere that I’m scrolling here, you could see the play button is following me. And it’s very engaging when I first came to the site, it makes you wonder, okay, well, what’s going on here, I got to click, I have to click and see how this work. So I love some of the features on here.

Thomas Magny 6:49 

I love it. Jeremy, you were very easy to impress. That’s amazing.

Jeremy Weisz 6:53 

I’ve not seen anyone else have this type of feature before maybe I’m not going enough websites, but I love, maybe talk about a milestone. And with a client, because, obviously the company has been around for a while. And right now people may be thinking, well, you’ve had big brands. So maybe it’s not so hard to get a puma, do you remember one of the milestones where maybe it wasn’t so easy to get one of these great flagship clients.

Thomas Magny 7:31 

So we have a very, very versatile portfolio of clients. Right. So I think the easiest way is building on your expertise and your experience, and you know what, what kind of sector you have in your portfolio to knock at some doors, right? I think we had many milestones like, opening some different markets in different sectors from just the business development intelligence that we have, and the trust that we have to our clients is something that is amazing, like, we started years and years ago, in the education sector, for example, we work in with so many different organization with so many different schools, like, on so many different levels, for us to knock on the door, or to win, like an indication mandate is a little bit more easy than other sectors that they didn’t want to and something for me that it was kind of like a milestone recently in Canada and Toronto, is to win the Solenoid account. Solenoid, I’m gonna give you them a little shout out here. But Solenoid is the first developer of sustainable solution for managing water, meaning that they are solution. They’re like a sustainable solution for the SIM and pipe that we have all over our cities all over in a countryside, residential, commercial, name it so like, they’re a fully integrated company, that is the circular economy as well. So they’re recycling a lot of plastic to make some PhD pipes, and to really be able to master the reusable water that we have in our grounds. So being able to kind of, pierce that sustainable market for us. I mean, for us, and for me, is the big milestone, because we want to make a difference, we want to bring purpose and bring a difference into the market. Right? And not just an I’m sorry, but like, to sell the new chips that is, you know, in the grocery stores, right?

Jeremy Weisz 9:43 

What were they looking for when they came to you?

Thomas Magny 9:46 

They were looking for a lot of different things. So it’s a Canadian brand, a Canadian company. You know, they had many competitors on the market. So like they’re trying to be like the thought leader, right? I mean, they’re not trying, they are, but we need to be able to communicate that. That’s the first objective here, we need to convert, we need to talk to the right audience. But now we are operating their integration into the US market, which is a whole new ballgame. It’s a different markets, different storytelling. I mean, it’s still the same brand. But we need to tweak it a little bit more. So we are rebranding Salerno from the US markets, bringing them a little bit of a better storytelling for this market, and being able to really communicate the plus the value of their product and the urgency of this matter here. So, yes, you could see, you could talk to so many different things, specifically in terms of a spec of a product, but what is the real benefits? And I think like this is what we need to communicate as an agency, what are the benefits of a product or service? And I think this is something that we’re trying to really nail with them. And so far, we’re doing an amazing job, I think our team are killing it.

Jeremy Weisz 11:05 

How does that work? As far as so like, obviously, you’re doing a deep dive to kind of uncover the benefits. And I’m sure when a company is too close to it, sometimes it’s easier for a company like you to come in from the outside and identify these but then talk about the execution part. So from the video part paid like, how do you actually get the word out?

Thomas Magny 11:33 

Well, it’s a funnel, it’s a process that we are trying to do every day in the most shearers ethical approaches possible. Sorry, my French.

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