T‘rono eh!

Toronto lives up to it’s name as one of North America’s friendliest cities!

I arrived in the city of Toronto late Saturday night. Cleared immigration and caught the UPS into Union station — a 7 minute walk from where I’m staying, smack bang in the middle of the city and right in front of the famous CN Tower. Thank you Havas! (not to mention a 16 minute walk from the agency). Luckily this left me the Sunday to walk all around the city just taking it all in. It’s an easy city to get around — the CN Tower is a great help whenever I’m lost. There seems to be something happening on every corner which makes for a great first impression.

The Agency

I arrived at Havas Toronto after 1 hour of sleep — jet lag hit me hard!

Day 1 was spent meeting my coach, Scott Cameron (Creative Director) and the rest the Havas Digital Department, aka ‘Rally’. There seems to be great banter within the team and you can tell everyone gets along but also gets the job done. Every Monday morning they have a stand-up session to run through what’s going on (and introduce the new guy) and so I was able to get a quick overview of what projects were going through the department — in a nutshell, LOTS!! There were a bunch of brand names mentioned — some I recognized and others I didn’t. The majority of the digital department’s clients seem to be banks and telcos.

The setup of the departments is slightly different to what we have in Sydney — here at Havas Toronto, ‘traditional’ sits and works separately from ‘digital’ and with relatively little crossover. That is supposedly slowly changing and in fact I was invited to sit in on a RFP briefing where someone from each department was involved. But like Sydney, the media guys have their things going on in their part of the building and then there’s Plastic Mobile who sit in their own section (a mobile innovation lab — I’m hoping to find out a little more about exactly what these guys do whilst I’m here).

But everywhere I look there seems to be ALOT going through all the departments at the moment and everyone is still in good spirits which says a lot about a place!