Canadian sports retailer Sport Chek has parted with its first-ever U.S. agency lead TBWA\Chiat\Day New York.
The relationship lasted just over a year, with the Omnicom shop winning a creative/strategy review at the end of 2015. Sport Chek, which is very large in Canada but doesn’t advertise much (if at all) outside its home country, sought a new agency in large part to drive its promotions around the 2016 Rio Olympics. It ended its relationship with former AOR Sid Lee right before hiring TBWA. The New York office led creative with TBWA Toronto lending support.
“We are proud of the work we did with TBWA and they obviously have a very talented team,” said Maria de Romana, senior communications manager for Sport Chek’s parent company FGL Sports. “As we have been shifting the large majority of our advertising dollars to digital channels, we have seen a rapidly increasing need for affordable, digital content at scale. We are finding that the best way to meet this need is to cultivate multiple agency relationships and also increase the amount of digital creative produced in house. We are certainly positive about the idea of working with TBWA again in the future and value their ‘disruptive’ creative platforms.”
This statement is in keeping with the chain’s earlier decision to move away from AOR relationships in dropping Sid Lee.
A TBWA spokesperson declined to comment on the news. But the network created hundreds of pieces of content surrounding the Olympics, and anthem spot #WhatItTakes was one of the most-viewed ads in Canada around the games in Rio.
We hear that client and agency had some creative differences afterward, and SVP of marketing and e-commerce Frederick LeCoq, who helped sign TBWA, later left the company for a similar role at Toronto-based retailer Golf Town.
The client spokesperson declined to clarify whether the company will be seeking a new creative lead agency, but the quote above does imply that more future campaigns will be created in-house.
Sport Chek is not a global brand, and its U.S. paid media spend was just over $2.1 million in 2015, according to Kantar Media.