Jeremy Weisz 11:49
We’ll talk through a few examples in a second of how you put that into play. But when we were talking before he recorded, I thought it was interesting, you said something about repositioning, and repositioning yourselves, and you also said, you used to give away something and now you charge for it. Yep. Can you talk about what you are giving away in that decision to start actually charging for it?
Tony Lyons 12:18
Yeah, so designers, creative writers, ad agencies, people that deliver creative services. If you’re any good at your job, you should be asking an awful lot of questions before you put pen to paper, right? You should have primary and secondary research desk research, whatever research you can gather, to get as much data as you can. But you really need to talk to an awful lot of people. Like if you’re doing for example, I put it in the context of a brand development for a not-for-profit organization. So the way we look at it is the brand already exists with inside that organization, right? If you’re inventing something, it’s probably not true, what you’d want to do is uncover the truth, and then put a wrapper around it in the form of a brand program, so that you can codify it and systemize it and make it consistent over time, and then give people the framework to continually look at all of their messaging and their activities, and anything that they do visa vie their internal audiences or their external audiences through the lens of that brand. In order to do that, you need to do a whole bunch of stakeholder engagement, right, you need to talk to senior leadership, partners, government partners, maybe you need to talk to the public, you need to talk to customers, you need to talk to the lowest person on the rung and the highest person on the rung and everybody in between. When you do that, through a directed stakeholder engagement program, you’ll start to see key themes emerge, that will inform the narrative of the brand, right? Not all of them are positive, as a matter of fact, some of them are negative. Well, that’s good, it’s good to see those things, right. Because then you can figure out how we can, you know, assuage people’s fears, or turn off a mechanism or a process that’s not working in favor of something that is more positively received. And then you can start to build that brand narrative. So that’s what you shouldn’t be doing to develop a brand before you even design anything or write anything you need to understand the essence of it. Good brand companies do that. And we were doing it, but we’re just wrapping that into the output. Like we’d say we’ll do three days of stakeholder engagement. And then they wouldn’t even be a line item on the invoice it is just be part of the brand development. Well, the reality is that part of the process is the most valuable part of the process that they’re going to get, because more than likely nobody has ever done that for that organization before. Nobody has done psychotherapy on that organization. And the reason I say the word psychotherapy is that some organizations try to develop brand narratives from within that is literally like doing psychotherapy on yourself, you can’t do it, you need an external person to point out your flaws and challenge you on things, right. And you need the voice or the ear of an external consultant to give a level playing field to people who might not say a negative thing to their manager or to somebody more senior, because it could affect their employment future, right? It’s all confidential, when they work with us. So it’s very open, and it’s it, you really get some really juicy stuff. So we know we’ll just do that component. As it will, we’ll do that component as a stage of a brand development. And if the client then wants to continue to work with this, hopefully they will, we will then start building out the messaging framework. And we will use our methodology for doing that we have a sort of a kind of proprietary methodology for doing that. And only after that’s done, there’s the shape of what it looks like and sounds like and feel like start to uncover itself. But it has to be built on that foundation of uncovering the truth and deep understanding, building the frame, the messaging framework or the narrative, and then showing what that looks like and what it feels like if you go through that full process. It’s pretty much bulletproof, because nobody within the organization can say they weren’t asked their opinion. And that’s not true. And nobody outside of the organization who’s going to consume those messages will see something and go, this is completely out of left field. I don’t know what they’re talking about, that you’re basically telling people what they want to hear, because it’s the truth. And then you’re just putting a system around it, so that it can be consistent over time.
Jeremy Weisz 17:10
Yeah, it’s coming from them. So they can’t say where this come from. It came from you. Actually, what it makes me think about, Tony is, what stuff we’re doing, or the people I talked to, that is not a line item, right? Like we’re doing that is highly valuable, that is just kind of baked in, but it could be something separate. How did you then reposition yourself using that?
Tony Lyons 17:38
Yeah, so the beauty of doing a deep stakeholder engagement and uncovering this essence of a brand is that you can demonstrate to it to senior leadership and organizations that brand is a transformative thing, right? If you want transformative change, you can use your brand as a tool for that to happen. So you get the ear of C-suite CEO CFO COO all of the all of the big dawgs, right? As opposed to a no offense to the comms or marketing department. They’re typically viewed within a lot of organizations as more of a tactical have-to-have as opposed to a strategic must-have. So what we’ve seen over the years and the agency world is seeing it is the rise of the Big Five, or the Big Four, management consulting firms and their engagement in our world, right? The Deloitte KPMGs and Canada EY. And if you have UI even PWC. They’re now offering strategic marketing services, and doing a lot of similar things that agencies used to do. The problem for agencies is that agencies deal with marketing managers, Deloitte deals with CEOs, right? So when you want something to change within an organization, you got to talk to the boss, so they’re the only person that can make that change happen. And when you uncover the truth of a brand and you get everybody to agree on the strategic direction of that brand, which should obviously align with the strategic business goals, that’s the whole point. But it can also adjust the strategic business goals it can make people it’s a sober second thought it can make people reconsider the strategic direction of the organization. When you’re having those conversations, you’re now acting more like a strategic consultant than you are, like the deliverer of services, which is what an ad agency is. And I don’t want to be an ad agency anymore because frankly, it’s a tactic that is valuable sometimes. But it’s a lot of the time it’s not. And a lot of people think that brand messaging is advertising. And it’s not brand is about actually changing how your company behaves. And then talking about it, the simplest way I can put it is that good advertising will make a bad restaurant go out of business faster. So a lot of people, when they hear that, and they kind of they go, like, let me say that a few times, they don’t quite get what you’re saying. It’s like you have to be what you say you are. Because as soon as you’re not, what’s the first thing somebody’s going to do is they’re going to go tell everybody else that you’re not what you say you are. And everything you’ve done, to create that message of saying what you are, has now done yourself a complete disservice. So how about looking at yourself introspectively and being better towards the, in the avenues that you need to be better and based on your strategic planning strategic goals? Putting a story around that, and allowing the research through that stakeholder engagement to influence not only the story, but influence what you’re actually doing as well.
Jeremy Weisz 17:51
Tony, I like what you’re saying, with the repositioning one you reap help companies reposition so yeah, a turn the tables for yourself. But I like your thinking about how we ought to be in the arena with the strategic management consulting companies. I mean, there’s a lot of reasons why. And being in that arena, one, I mean, if you’re an agency, and you are let’s just talk about pricing, right, like for the same project, and I’m making this up, I have zero idea, but just from the people I know, that have worked in corporate one was telling me a couple weeks ago, like they may charge a million dollars for a project. And I’m like thinking, well, if an agency were to do that they probably charge $10,000? And maybe if that. Right? And I’m not saying it’s apples to apples, but there’s a lot of things that were comparable there. How do you think about pricing when you’re rolling out this new? It’s not new, but it’s a new is like a separate line item that’s usually built into the project?
Tony Lyons 22:38
Yeah, well, I mean, it’s better for us for sure. Because when you get higher in the food chain, you have to deliver higher-value services, right? So it’s not about just repositioning, you actually have to deliver. And that delivery is based on research. And it’s also based on a strategic advisory model to based on other similar clients that we work with, and we can demonstrate success with those clients. And you can call those people and ask them on all this kind of stuff. But the agency model is broken. And here’s why. Really, the agency, the ad agency model is not based on the delivery of consulting services, or creative, it’s based on the agency’s ability to sell as much media as it can, and get as many points off that media as it can, right. So with the aggregation of those advertising agency conglomerates, like the WPS and publicists and all of these giant global firms, there’s no way that an independent agency can compete with that. So I don’t want to play that game. I don’t want to be in that race, because it’s a race to the basement. Because essentially, like, if you want to make 10 points, well, they make they’ll take eight points, you want to make eight points, they’ll make six points off $100,000 or a million dollars, right. So that’s not the game that I want to play. And to be honest, I don’t fully believe in the mechanism anymore, either. Because there’s so much waste and fraud in advertising now. And it’s extremely difficult to I mean, as much as digital reporting, people say it’s down to the click, it’s really not like it’s like there. There’s a whole bunch of unknowns in there too. And the Googles and Facebooks of the world and Twitters or X of the world, they keep their cards pretty close to their chest as well. So it is as much as we are as open as we possibly can be with our clients and they can see that the reporting, the numbers don’t always match up and we can’t tell them why we don’t know why they, some hundreds of 1000s of impressions disappear, and I can’t tell you why, you know, and then neither can Facebook. So I go, there’s something funny going on there. And I don’t like the model from a finance point of view. And I don’t like the model just from an integrity point of view either. So I think it’s what I want to be is higher in the food chain, and advising senior leadership on what the narrative is and how that narrative can get codified and systemized. And then if you want us to disseminate that, or promote that, we will help you do that. But you can work with other people to do that, too at the same time, right. So I think that when you have a conversations at C-suite, the hourly rate is better than if you’re having conversations with a marketing department. They’re higher-value conversations.
Jeremy Weisz 25:58
So when you’re thinking of pricing it, are you thinking of pricing it, how many hours it’s going to take to deliver on it? Or is it more of a set, here it is for us to do this whole strategic break brand consulting strategy?
Tony Lyons 26:15
Yeah. So we operate in a fixed-price scenario. And there’s pros and cons, right? It’s up to us to hit our numbers, right. But what I don’t want to be doing is, I don’t want to be a taxi, I don’t want to put the meter on and for the clients to be continually watching it, and hoping that they get there before their budget runs out. That’s not the relationship that I want with our clients. We have long-term relationships, 10, 12 years, which is really unheard of, in our industry. But the reason for that is that we’re straight with them, we make mistakes, sure we make mistakes, but we own up to it. Anything financial is entirely transparent as it relates to spending their budget. So if I tell him, it’s going to cost $20,000. That’s an approximation of an aggregate of some of my time CEO time, senior strategist, time developer time, like so we’ll build the estimate, based on time for sure. But it’s up to us to keep ourselves honest, they know that they’re going to spend $20,000, sometimes we go over, sometimes we’re under. But at the end of the day, I can sleep better at night by not nickel and diming my clients over. Yeah, and we went five hours over budget on a project. I don’t want that. I don’t want that for my suppliers. If somebody’s doing something for me, and I don’t want to be that have that relationship with my clients either.
Jeremy Weisz 27:53
What services do you offer at Alphabet Creative?
Tony Lyons 27:57
Yeah, well, we offer strategic marketing consulting, so that’s research. And I know the analysis of the research, we worked with marketing, either leads or CMOs, or marketing managers that, we challenge them on their strat plans a lot of the time, and we will create a strategic plan. From there, we’ll build out a tactical set, like an actual plan, like so here’s the things that we need to do. And it could be some advertising, digital marketing, content marketing is a huge component of that what we do right now, obviously, on the digital side, there’s SEO components. There’s all of them. There’s the Google intranet, there’s all social media, marketing, all those things. We do web and application development for our clients too. That’s a big part of it. We do software integration. So CRM integration, if they have a particular need associations have quite specific needs as it relates to member retention and acquisition. So there are existing software tools that they might need to integrate into their ecosystem. So they’re sometimes hard to do, we’ll help them do that. So we will write API’s and make sure that the data flow is smooth throughout the whole customer journey, give our clients a better line of sight as to who’s doing what, when and why. And we do custom technical application development as well. We also do some experiential marketing. We do communications programs, and obviously, brand development. So creative services, like design, and brand have elements of creating a brand narrative, putting it brand identity on top of that brand narrative and then promoting it.
Jeremy Weisz 29:52
When you first started Alphabet Creative, what was the initial offering? What were the services then?
Tony Lyons 29:58
As a designer, as graphic designer, and so it’s me, that’s me sitting in my spare bedroom, like, I’ve left an agency, I moved from Ireland in 95. I had about six, seven years’ experience at the time working in ad agencies. I moved to Ottawa 95, I worked for an ad agency for about five years. And when I left, I was the associate Creative Director at that agency. And so pretty broad range of services like but mostly you ad development, campaign development, so I left and I was able to write and design ads, right, that’s, that’s the thing I could do both of those things. So I’m sure there’s creatives rolling their eyes go when you’re looking, you’re not doing either of them very well. And in that case, but yeah, I was pretty good at both of them. And I was not a bad designer. I’m not the world’s best designer, but I’m not a bad designer. So I got by for a while. And then I landed a piece of business with a large Crown Corporation here. Crown Corporation is a like, essentially a government department that’s arm’s length. And started doing a ton of design work. And I couldn’t do it also hired a couple of people.
Jeremy Weisz 31:16
How did you get the client?
Tony Lyons 31:19
Just relationship management, somebody knows somebody, they don’t I tell you exactly how it went. Somebody who I knew from my previous job was working with a very large, multinational ad agency out of Toronto. They’re in this grand corporation, which will remain nameless. And they needed a sales sheet on for an insurance product that they’re selling, right. And they couldn’t get it done, because the ad agency that they were working with, wasn’t really interested in doing that. And the process was tedious and expensive. So they called me. And it’s so embarrassing. These numbers are so embarrassing. So I think from memory, it was like two hours of my time. And I think I said I’m going to charge $120 an hour, which was like seemed outrageous for a designer and 90s, whenever was 2001, but it was about the going rate. So the bill was 240 bucks for that thing, right? That’s two hours of my time. I sent it off, they’re delighted. Next thing, those floodgates of work started to come in, I was just completely inundated. Two and a half years later, it was probably $280,000 a year from the same client.
Jeremy Weisz 32:44
So maybe it was good that you charge that.
Tony Lyons 32:47
Yeah, maybe. But then that just comes down to and I think it’s a lesson for all good business people. Just treat people well, treat your clients well treat your employees well. Be straight with people. Like it’s not like you need to hustle in the sense that you need to work hard. And you do need to get an edge on people when you’re in competitive situations. But it’s not really a rat race. It shouldn’t be, like, businesses, humanity and humans need to treat people with respect. So I’ve always thought that, and we demand that our clients treat us with respect. And when they don’t, there’s conversations that happen, but it’s seldom, but there are times where somebody loses their cool with a junior person for no reason. And it’s not acceptable. We don’t accept that. And similarly, we treat our clients with respect with honesty, and tell them exactly what’s happening and bring them into the fold and show them the process and be transparent with your financials and the whole thing. And I think if you operate like that, you can sleep well at night. And ultimately, the universe will pay you back.
Jeremy Weisz 34:05
As you grew Tony, what were some of the key hires? Position-wise that you put in place?
Tony Lyons 34:12
Yeah, I mean, there’s been a few for sure. senior leader of technology, for sure started out as a web developer. Like I don’t know how to build, I know what it takes to build websites. I can’t code I’m not a coder. I know enough about relational databases to be a nuisance to engineers, but that’s about it. So that was a key hire. Senior VP, which is now our CEO, that was probably the most important hire over the last 23 years.
Jeremy Weisz 34:51
How did you decide to by the way, we’re looking at the alphabetcreative.com website you could see here, but talk about the decision to bring to elevate someone to CEO?
Tony Lyons 35:05
Yeah, so I’m a member of a business working group, it’s in the States, it’s called Vistage. So in Canada, it’s called TEC, the executive committee. And that membership of that organization has been transformational for me as an entrepreneur in a number of ways. One, I’m I allowed to swear on this podcast, by the way, sure, okay, it totally calls you out on your own bullshit, like completely calls you out. Which is great, because you can be one man bullshit echo chamber, very quickly if you’re not careful. And it also, sort of because you’re with similar entrepreneurs in similar situations, I’ll be at different industries, everybody’s looking for a way to grow, and everybody’s looking for what their exit should be. Right. So, I mean, I’m probably young enough, and I’m not thinking about an exit too seriously, but it’s not that far away. And I really needed to build a management team that could help me take it to the next level, and essentially, have this machine called Alphabel work autonomously without me. So that’s my goal. My personal goal is planned obsolescence, right? Like, it shouldn’t be for any business owner. And in order to do that, you need to get really bums and seats, right. And I feel like I’ve done a pretty good job of that over the years. And we have another hire joining next week, actually, which I’m really excited about. And it’s a Director of Client Services and strategy. And she comes from a more of a PR background, highly strategic thinker, deep expertise in digital development, amazing client relationship manager. So she’s going to be able to be a mentor to our Client Services team on our account management team, which currently is myself and the CEO. But it’s like this, we just wear too many hats, we’re trying to take some hats off and given to other people. And I let go a little bit, and not lose sight of the vision of where we want to take the company. But inject our vision and our culture and our values throughout the company, but allow other people to manage it in the way that they see fit, by using our values and aligning with our vision. So I’m excited.
Jeremy Weisz 37:45
What were you looking for in a CEO, because obviously, you could have, as you did brought, brought someone from within, or you could have got someone from the outside too?
Tony Lyons 37:56
They were from within, they’ve been with us for five years, I think at that point is, as a VP of Client Services, actually, what I was looking for was a strategic thinker, a natural leader, a mentor to younger people, highly organized, good financial business acumen, I have all of those things, but I don’t want to do all of those things. It’s not what gets me out of bed in the morning. What gets me out of bed is solving problems for people creatively, whether it really is an ad campaign, or it’s a piece of communication, or a brand platform, or even just some ideas on how to build strategic partnerships that help fuel your business growth and stuff like that. So that’s what excites me, the machine of operating a business as it relates to all the admin, all the HR stuff. All the financial reporting is vitally important. It’s just not my jam. So, you need to get somebody whose jam it is, and who enjoys doing that stuff. Right. And so, that was why I made that decision.
Jeremy Weisz 39:19
Talk about things from a culture, I know culture is important to you?
Tony Lyons 39:25
Culture is breakfast, right.
Jeremy Weisz 39:30
Peter Drucker, right? What do you do to maintain culture?
Tony Lyons 39:37
Yeah, I think an openness too, so there’s a pretty much an open door policy that people can come to me with their problems or come to COO with their problems. I think being transparent with everybody as to what the vision of the company is and where we’re going. I think we have a casual approach to professionalism and we don’t have a corporate culture per se, we have a work culture. But it’s not a corporate work culture. If you wandered around here like this people joking around and we have a pretty nice office, we have a cafeteria, which is custom designed to feel like a Starbucks or that people just go and hang out and, and work like so they can feel like they leave their desk and they go and work there. We are in the office environment, predominantly. I know some people would just be shaking their heads if that and go, you’re behind the times. And maybe I am. But I don’t know, I’m a humanist. And I believe that people need to be with people in order to maximize their potential, especially in the creative field. You can work in a silo for a bit, you can do a sprint, or you can sit in a dark room and think of ideas. And that’s fine. To validate those ideas and to stress test them, you need to be doing that ongoing with other people, and you need to feed off their creative energy. And that really only happens in a room. Right. So it really behooves me then to create the environment for whereby people can do that. And you know what, people say, well, what’s your work-from-home policy, and our work-from-home policy is you can work from home whenever you want. That’s the policy. But you must understand that if you’re working from home, and you’re in a creative team environment, the rest of the team was wondering where you are, because you’re not contributing to the Creative Commons at that point. You can do it via zoom. Sure, you can do it on Slack, not really, like you need to be instantly bouncing ideas off people walking over to their desk, testing it, going back to your desk, and making many incremental presentations as the day goes on. And that’s a big part of our culture. It’s not for everybody, like I completely understand it’s not for everybody. But you don’t have to work here. Like, you can go work somewhere else that’s fully remote, that’s fine. But if you want to work here, you’re going to be predominantly in the office. That’s a big part of our culture.
Jeremy Weisz 42:23
Let’s talk about niche for a second. I know you…
Tony Lyons 42:28
The German philosopher you mean or. You say Nietsche in Canada.
Jeremy Weisz 42:35
Oh, niche. And sorry, yes. I know you serve for profits, but you also have a large segment of associations, nonprofits and destinations. Talk about how you got in, how you started really focusing more? Because I’m sure you can serve anyone with these services. Was there some point where you started to focus more on specific niches?
Tony Lyons 43:06
Yeah, well, yeah. I mean, it happened somewhat organically and then intentionally after that. So we were based out of Ottawa, capital of Canada. Smaller market, not the biggest city. But what happens in capital cities, right. A lot of government advocacy, a lot of Government relations, a lot of associations and not-for-profits who are funded by government are looking to influence government. So in Ottawa alone, a city of just over a million people, there’s 600 associations, right? So it’s a big industry, and in and around that there’s non-government organizations as well. And there’s Crown corporations, and they all have significant budget, and they all have problems to solve, right? So we started working with a couple of associations, and we had other for-profit clients. We had like an environmental store, we still have one of the country’s largest home builders, which is one of our valued clients. But as we started working through the association world, we began to realize, well, it’s pretty niche. There’s a lot of specifics and nuances to developing marketing and communications programs that help these organizations. You got to understand what government relations mean, we don’t do lobbying, but we work with lobbyists. So that we’re in line so with what their driving messages are, so that the whole thing is working together. And we decided to put a stake in the ground or hang out or shingle and just be that thing. And once we started to speak that language and how hire some people with specific association experience, build out work with partners who develop technology with insight, that’s very specific to the association ecosystem. You start to gain traction and notoriety, you also start to build a ton of experience and transfer the knowledge from one association to the other Association. I mean, the reality is, if you ask any executive director, president or CEO of an association, like what are the two biggest challenges that they have? Member retention, number one, member acquisition, number two, those are the two things. So if you’re going to help them, you need to be able to address those two things, member retention and member acquisition. So that’s what we’ve done. And the third thing they’re going to talk about is how do I influence government to either stop a policy or change a policy, or develop a policy or a piece of legislation that helps my members visa vie my industry? So how do you do that, well you try and get the public involved, so that the public understands that government should change that piece of legislation or that policy, because the only thing that government really cares about is its electorate, who’s going to vote for them, and they will do what the voting public want them to do most of the time. So we do member acquisition member retention programs, public advocacy campaigns, and then we build technology into those organizations through visa vie websites, CRMs, specific data management systems, custom tools, e-commerce portals for selling services and documents and things like that. Yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 46:59
So you found that associations and the nonprofits in those companies were in around the city, and there was like a, just a rich group of those?
Tony Lyons 47:10
Yeah. This is an interesting program, if I can just talk about this for a second. Yep. So this is for CREA Canadian Real Estate Association. So this would be the equivalent of what are they called, what are they called in the States, the Realtors Association of America or something like that? I can’t remember. So the equivalent, they’re a member-based Association. And they came to us, this is about maybe six or seven years ago. And they said, we want to develop a program that shows our members realtors, that we deliver value back to them as an association, we have X amount of dollars to do it. And we want you to develop an ad campaign specifically designed to realtors to tell them that we give them value. So the first thing I went was, well, telling somebody that you give them value is not going to change their mind about whether you given them value or not. So instead, we convinced them to not do an ad program but rather to take the money and do across Canada speaking tour. So what we did was we did a very local and very specialized hour-long event, and we invited not just every realtor but key influential realtors in these markets, brokerage owners, presidents and C-suite of local real estate associations. And we put on a show with there’s a lady whose name from Dragon’s Den Canada, Michelle Romano, and a guy that gentleman who you saw at the podium earlier, Terry Riley, and Terry is a quite a well-known radio personality comes from the advertising industry. And he’s a well-known radio personality. This is an amazing public speaker, highly engaging. And he’s quite famous. So we put on this show. And we took it around Canada, we did three experiences in Kitchener Waterloo, Victoria, BC, and Calgary, Alberta. And we conceived, designed, produced the show. And it was such a huge success that the organization went on to 10 more across the country using the same format. So from that, let’s do a couple of $100,000 ad campaign which anybody in the ad industry will no you can’t do anything without amount of money. From that request to doing a highly engaged, highly intimate, ultimately memorable experience for realtors who still talk about it to this day. So that’s the type of consulting services that we deliver. It’s like helping clients re-envision how to use their money to express their brand sentiment in the best possible way that we would have made more money out of doing the ad campaign is way easier, but it’s not the right thing to do. And that’s why, 10 years later, we’re still working with the organization, because they know that we’re on their side.
Jeremy Weisz 50:33
Last question, Tony, okay. First of all, thank you for sharing your stories, your journey, even the embarrassing parts, and people can check out alphabetcreative.com to learn more. But my last question is, how does Google weave into the story?
Tony Lyons 50:57
They’re listening, so be careful what you say? Well, it’s interesting, so 15, maybe 17 years ago. And this is a lesson for entrepreneurs and brands everywhere, is to own your IP and trademark your brand, for sure. So, I had heard a horror story from a colleague whose was running at a services company, a consulting firm, and had registered with the local entrepreneurship Bureau, the name of the company, but hadn’t bothered to go into the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and register it as a trademark. They hadn’t gone through that official process. And they actually got a cease and desist from another brand who had done that. And they had to change the name of their organization. So I thought, well, hold on, like recall Alphabet. I’ve been using Alphabet for this probably eight years at that point. And I’m thinking someone else is gonna do this, for sure. Like, I mean, this is a pretty common word. I didn’t even know if I could register it. So went through the process of trademarking the word alphabet as a registered trademark, the word, the logo, and all various types in certain classes. And that was just a thing that I did as a peace of mind, as I felt like I should do that thing. And then all of a sudden, like, across the newspaper, one morning, I started getting all these emails and text messages and Facebook messages, like, what are you gonna do? Google is calling itself Alphabet now. So I’m like what. So of course, I look at it, and immediately called my IP lawyer. And they’re like, well, I mean, you’re registered, and you have registered in good standing. And you’ve also defended it against other organizations. We successfully defended it against BMW, who had a car leasing brand called Alphabet. We successfully defended it against some smaller brands as well. So we have a track record of actively defending our IP. I don’t like yeah, I know but it’s Google. What am I gonna do? Like, this is like, my slingshots not going to kill like Goliath. Anyway. So we formed the strategy. And the thing you do is you send them a letter to say it’s not a cease and desist. That’s more of a by the way. We have exclusive rights to the name alphabet. And right in our description, it says that we do internet marketing services. So what do you do? Right? And I mean, I was fully expecting to get completely ignored, right? As a mosquito in a windshield might. But no, we got a response. And the response was, we do not believe that we are in contradiction to your brand. That was it. And then like, so what do we do now? So there are options available in a bit of a wait and see mode. As you can imagine, I get you need to start doing push-ups before you enter into that arm wrestle contest, right? So we’re a small company, there’s only 30 people here. I would say we would be a rounding error to Google if we had to go up against them in court. So we are entirely entitled to tell them to stop using the name alphabet in Canada. It’s not in North America. It’s just in Canada and I believe we would win that if we chose to. The question is, is it worth it? Right? So, I’ll leave it at that.
Jeremy Weisz 55:12
We’ll have you come back and tell the story. No, but seriously, Tony, thank you. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. Thanks for sharing the story of your company and the evolution of everyone check out alphabetcreative.com to learn more, and we’ll see everyone next time. Thanks, Tony.
Tony Lyons 55:28
Thanks a lot.
