BaD Mktg named global AOR for Jamieson Wellness
The six-month old agency founded by Ian Buck and Yotam Dor will help grow the Canadian wellness brand around the world.
by Emma Johnston-Wheeler April 05 2024
BaD Mktg, aka Buck and Dor Marketing, the brainchild of industry veterans Ian Buck and Yotam Dor, has been appointed global creative AOR for Jamieson Wellness. The brand partnership is the agency’s largest client win since launching in October.
Overseeing multiple brands across the Jamieson Wellness portfolio, with a primary focus on the 100-year-old flagship brand Jamieson Vitamins, BaD Mktg will spearhead the launch of a new brand platform leveraging its “Made in Canada” bona fides. Buck compared the potential to that of the Canada Goose brand, which he worked on for several years during its global expansion.
Since Jamieson has a different presence in each of the markets it occupies, BaD Mktg will employ various strategies market to market. “In Canada, it’s by far the market leader. If you walk into any Shoppers [by example], they own the majority of the retail space,” said Buck. “So in Canada, it’s a very different beast because in every other market that they’re in, they’re closer to startup level.”
The company is presently building its presence in the U.S. through the recent acquisition of California-based Nutrawise, parent company of the Youtheory brand of collagen supplements.
"Jamieson has a legacy of excellence spanning over a century, and our partnership with BaD Mktg represents an exciting new chapter in our journey,” said senior vice-president global marketing for Jamieson Wellness, Eric Bentz, in a release.
BaD Mktg's model blends strategic insights with storytelling, data and technology, and a social-first production lens that pulls on a distributed network of creators to develop the most engaging short-form content platform to platform.
They aim to provide an agile service that prioritizes short turnaround times. The roots of the model go back to 2012, when the pair co-founded Notch Video for North Strategic PR founders Mia Pearson and Justin Creally. It was a standalone, full-service creative content agency that focused on production, but managed workflow through a PR agency model.
Everyone was working on everything, conceptualizing the best and most efficient way to create content for different platforms, explained Buck. “It’s a great system for when brands need to do more smaller campaigns, it’s an always-on world,” he said. “You can’t apply that six-week briefing process to something that needs to come out next week.”
Notch was acquired by Publicis in 2016 as part of the North Strategic deal. In 2022, Buck and Dor were hired by IPG and tasked with introducing their content capabilities into a creative agency model. However, they soon realized that their preference for speed and agility didn’t work well in a traditional holding company setting. “That was the impetus for us to go back out and just start working with brands directly again,” said Buck.
BaD doesn’t use a retainer pricing model for any of its clients, and instead works on a project basis. Many projects are consultancy based, including work with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). The project is an initiative between YouTube and CAMH to provide current and credible mental health information on the YouTube Health platform. Other consultancy efforts include working with companies to help them streamline their work processes to incorporate AI and the changing landscape of production.
Buck said they are using LLMs to streamline their own processes and working on an AI-driven tool he calls “a supercharger tool for social media teams," that they intend to productize. It’s essentially a private LLM built on a brand’s internal data.
“It’s a way to look at everything that's happening online and figure out what is actually of interest to our audience,” he said. “And of everything that's happening today, what's a thought starter for a social post? And that can get delivered to your inbox every morning,” explained Buck.