Globe & Mail Business for the Arts Awards – 2007 Winners

Most Innovative Marketing Sponsorship

Award-Winning Partnerships with the Arts

The business: Rethink Communications is a Vancouver-based advertising agency, founded in 1999 by Chris Staples, Tom Shepansky and Ian Grais. The agency has won numerous advertising awards and counts Future Shop, Solo Mobile and 1-800-GOT-JUNK amongst its clients. This 60+person shop recently added another Award to its mantel: The Globe & Mail Business for the Arts Award for the Most Innovative Marketing Sponsorship.

The arts org: The Contemporary Art Gallery, a non-profit public art gallery located in Vancouver's busy Yaletown, nominated Rethink for this Award. Like many arts organizations, the Gallery was seeking ways to raise awareness and increase membership. It also faced a more unique problem of being housed in a ubiquitous highrise: not all passers-by realized an art gallery awaited their exploration inside. Suffering from a lack of awareness outside the art community and a non-descript facade, the Gallery partnered with Rethink to help gain awareness and increase membership. Rethink seized on the Gallery's prime location, and began to turn heads.

The partnership: Rethink covered the exterior of the Contemporary Art Gallery building with 50,000 buttons, each printed with a single word that represented a possible response to contemporary art. “LUCKY”, “PLAYFUL”, “STOKED”: 100 different options in multiple colours. From a distance, the entire button wall read “This is contemporary art.” Up close, the public was free to walk away with as many buttons as they wanted in this interactive promotional installation for the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver. This highly-visible and uniquely-branded space not only captured the attention of pedestrians and raised the Gallery's profile amongst the public, it could be seen as a piece of art itself.

The outcome: A highly imaginative example of business and art combined!

Congratulations to Rethink Communications on winning the Globe & Mail Business for the Arts Award for the Most Innovative Marketing Sponsorship.

	The Globe and Mail Business for the Arts Awards · Winner Profiles 2008 · Past Winners · Nominate a Business The Edmund C. Bovey Award for Leadership Support of the Arts · Winner Profiles 2008 · Past Winners · Nominate a Leader · Endowment Fund and Prize Recipients The Arnold Edinborough Young Professionals Award · Winner Profiles 2008 · Nominate a Leader Awards Announcement 2008 Awards Album 2007

Jim Fleck, Chair of Business for the Arts (left) and Phillip Crawley, Publisher & CEO of The Globe and Mail (right) present Ian Grais, Partner of Rethink Communications, with his award.