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Opening quote from Rob Guénette: "We ought to shape it before it shapes us. I think that is the right healthy attitude."
Rick Brown: Welcome to "Why Didn't I Think of That?" This is our first episode of 2026, and we have a very special guest with us today. Rob Guénette is here. Rob is the CEO of VML Canada. He's an absolute legend in the advertising business and an incredible storyteller. So stay tuned for this – you're going to love it. And then right after that, we have a panel discussion about gamification with our host Jeremy Lens and Tim Voet.
Interview with Rob Guénette: From Brand Management to Agency Leadership
Rick: Welcome to the show, Rob. Do you want to maybe start with your background and how you got into advertising?
Rob: Sure. So I started my career at Unilever Canada as a client in brand management, and I was there for 14 years. Through that time period, I received the best business education I could ever have gotten. Unilever was amazing in those years. I started in '86 and left in '99, and was able to cross a lot of categories and learned a ton, worked with outstanding people.
Through that, though, I learned that I was really gravitating to one aspect of the job more than the others, and that was the advertising piece. I loved working in the communication area. I loved working with agencies. I loved doing work that the public saw, that impacted our brand and all that stuff. And I decided at one point I wanted to do two things: I wanted to work in advertising, so I'd cross the bridge, and I also wanted to be an owner. I wanted to have an equity stake. So those were my two objectives.
Rick: That's pretty ambitious, right?
Rob: It was. Well, I was at that stage in my life where I was super confident, I was ambitious, and I just wanted to get on with it. And I thought, if it happens, great. If it doesn't happen, you know, I'm happy. I have a good career, I have fun, I work with great people. But I got pretty lucky, and it happened.
The VML Connection
Rob: So what happened was, my first introduction to VML was at a dinner held at Peter Stringham's house in New York shortly after we sold. And he invited myself, my wife, Paul and Jane. And at that dinner was a man named John Cook. This was in 2010. And I met John Cook at that dinner and I was so impressed with John. He's amazing. And I was in awe of the VML trajectory.
And by the way, a little factoid: VML was born in 1992, same year as Taxi. So Taxi was born in Montreal in 1992, VML was born in Kansas City in 1992. Amazing.
So back then, there was a period of time where I would attend meetings in New York that Martin Sorrell chaired, and John Cook would also be attending those meetings. So I got to see John in action. I got to hear about VML. I would do my bit on Taxi, but really we were there because Telus was one of the largest accounts in North America at that time for WPP. It was a big account. It was massive.
So through that introduction, I was always an admirer of VML. And of course, VML was on a different track than Taxi. Taxi was a pure creative shop, really, and VML really started in digital and tech, and solving client problems in different ways – not necessarily through TV and outdoor and all that stuff. It was really wired differently, pun intended.
The Decision to Merge Taxi into VML Canada
Rob: So I always thought – well, first of all, I should say Taxi after the acquisition was a bit of a corporate orphan, right? Two things happened. One, we were attached to the VML system, so I reported to John Cook, and they were great with us. We were integrated, we were on all the global calls. We were part of all of it.
But at one point, I guess I had a moment, sort of one of those epiphanies, and I said, you know, VML's growing and the world is changing fast. They seem to be in the right lane. I thought it was time to change our direction with Taxi. And as you know, there was an opportunity that came up. There was a merger between VML and Y&R, and so at that moment in time, I said, you know what? I'd rather retire Taxi while it's still strong, while it's still great, and decided that it's time to put VML Canada on the map. And that was a manifestation of putting Taxi and WT together as Wunderman Thompson.
And that was a difficult, but I think necessary decision to really go where the growth was and go where the future is. Because I come at things a little bit more left-brain because of my background and how I grew up in business. And also as a person, I'm just not that nostalgic and I'm just not that emotional.
So for me, the way I looked at it, it was important to retain the spirit of Taxi, which lives every day, as you know, at VML Canada – as opposed to just the nomenclature, the naming. And again, I've seen in my – I've been around now 40 years – for me it's about how do we grow, how do we keep all our great people in place? How does everybody get stimulated, learn, and challenged and motivated, right?
And I just at that time thought the VML thing is going to be that thing for us. It's going to offer more career opportunities. I mean, VML is the largest agency in the world – 30,000-plus employees. And of course, as you know, the capabilities we have up and down is insane. So you're going to learn new capabilities, you're going to approach modern marketing in a different way and all that. So that was part of my thinking: how do I, as opposed to trying to keep a brand alive or reinvent a brand or whatever you want to call it, how do I make sure that the best people we have continue to be motivated, stimulated, intellectually stimulated, and future-proofed, if there is such a thing?
So that was part of it. Plus, here's the other thing: I just love change. I'm one of those weird guys.
Rick: Really? Well, now is your time.
Rob: Exactly. But I love it. I love change.
What Change Looks Like at VML Canada
Rick: What's change for you now? Well, how do we work now? That's completely different from before, or is it?
Rob: It is and it isn't, and I'll explain how I look at it. I referred to earlier the spirit of Taxi, and I see VML Canada – its creative soul comes from Taxi. Our ability to challenge status quo internally and externally is still alive. However, I see VML Canada, and I don't mean this with any disrespect to my old Taxi and Paul and Jane and everybody – everybody was there, Ron Wilson, Andrew Simon, all of us – I just think we're more sophisticated now.
I think we can show up no matter what the business problem is. We don't have to white label anything. We don't have to think, "Oh geez, we'll fake it till we make it," all that stuff, right? I just think we have more components. We're firing on many more cylinders. We're more sophisticated. There's more rigor in data, in AI, the whole nine yards, right?
So I think that my objective was – and I think you were in the audience when I said this – my objective was not to sort of take bits of Taxi and bits of Wunderman Thompson, put that in a blender and hit puree and hope something positive comes out. My objective was to start a new culture – and only take the essence of what was really great about Taxi and the essence of what was really great about Wunderman Thompson. So in other words, marry the artists and the geeks. It had to be a new culture.
But the other thing, the other benefit I see that has actually materialized – and I was hoping for this, and it's happened – because, you know, our guiding principle at VML Canada is: Proudly global. Fiercely local.
Now the global piece, as you know, we work on global pieces of business. We're invited to global pitches as VML Canada that otherwise wouldn't be there if we weren't in this fantastic network. And I'm telling you, some of the stuff is just insane. We're working on it or we're pitching that – that's crazy, man. I can't believe it, right?
And then locally, we show up, and I just think we're literally – I know this is going to sound so cliche – but we're literally getting the best of both worlds. And Graham Lang, as you know because you work for him, Graham is one of these CCOs – he's a citizen of the world. He made his bones in Cape Town and in London, and now obviously he's a big part of our business in Canada. I mean, for guys like that, for people like that, having one foot in the global arena and one foot in a local arena is the best case scenario. It's awesome.
Rick: He always has such a big perspective on things. It's amazing to have him here.
Rob: It's so cool. And so, you know, the nature of our business – I was just mentioning to someone walking in here, you know, working in this business, it's like watching the weather. Wait 10 minutes, it'll change. We have to be geared that we can't not only not be afraid of change, we have to run towards it. Not only can we not be afraid of conflict, we have to run towards it. If you don't have that mindset, you'll either stagnate or die, and neither of those options is very good.
So, you know, we're very lucky. I'm lucky, we're lucky at VML Canada that the leadership group is so tight. I love working with these people. They're awesome. And they all have the same mindset: whatever comes our way, we're going to win.
AI and the Future of Advertising
Rick: Speaking of things coming our way, what are your thoughts on AI and how it's changing the business?
Rob: In a way, I've seen this movie already – in a way. Now not as dramatic as AI, but the industry has gone through significant changes over the years, right? And I think what happens is when something as powerful and new and so dramatic as AI happens, the pendulum swings really hard. Really hard. But it is my belief that eventually things do reach equilibrium. That is to say that the pendulum swings back and it finds its right calibration.
So I think what we're going to see in the short term is an over-indexing on AI and how it's used. And thank God for super users like yourself and Jeremy and others, right? Because what you do – and remember what we talked about before, this healthy tension – I think the best outcome is going to be, in its equilibrium state, this healthy tension between the human element and the artificial element.
And I think that anybody who thinks that AI is going to dominate, I think is wrong. I think it's going to be yet another powerful tool, like many other tools that came before it. And you, again, you don't let your short-term greed interfere with your long-term greed. We all have to understand AI and become some level of a user – in your case, a super user. But this will be a part of the overall story. Eventually. Right now it's the story.
You know, there's a lot of AI slop going on, and I'm telling you that can backfire. That's exactly what it is. We ought to shape it before it shapes us. I think that's the right healthy attitude.
Rick: That needs to be our new tagline.
Finding the Right Balance
Rob: You know, I think that's the right way to approach it, and probably means you're going to have a long, healthy career. I really do think that when these new technologies come to bear, it's almost like everybody's rushing without thinking towards it. I mean, we need a certain amount of people to do that because we need to learn it. And there are certain groups – of which you are here at VML Canada – that over-index on it to learn it and then put it in its proper place. You gotta go too far before you realize, "Oh, okay."
Exactly. You know, and I think that like anything else, there are going to be mistakes made. There are going to be times where you pushed it too far, but I think that's part of the process of learning it. If you're not doing that, then you're really not taking the right kind of risk. You're not pushing it far enough.
And I think for me, and I just talked about this in a meeting yesterday, for me it's not about the mistake – you know, be it in the slop, some of the slop we're seeing, and other manifestations of it. To me it's not that. To me it's: What do you do in the recovery? How much did you learn? How effective is the recovery? How elegant, how quick is it? That's where the magic happens – not pushing the boundaries. No, that's not the magic. You need to do that in order to learn the other bits.
What's going to last is the human element that will never be lost. I don't care how powerful AI gets. As just a reminder, when we're doing things, we're trying to get people to change behavior. We're trying to get people to buy stuff, we're trying to get people to donate, we're trying to get people to do all kinds of things, right, in our effort to have effective communication.
So if all you're doing is chasing the technology, you're losing the real reason why the technology is in our business in the first place. Otherwise we'll lose sight of what we're really about, because we're not a tech company. Tech is part of our company, but we're not a tech company. We have to remember what the parts that make us good are, and AI and tech is one of the parts now.
Advice for Young People Entering the Industry
Rick: With all of that, what advice would you have for new people considering this?
Rob: So I would say to young people: the good old days are right now. They're right now. And one of the things that Paul Lavoie and I used to talk about a lot is don't look in the rear view mirror. In fact, at one point we took the rear view mirror off our cars just to make the point: don't look, just keep looking forward.
And I think that for young people, it's more about how you're built. And if you are the type of person that wants to have an adrenaline rush, that loves change, that wants to be in an environment with the kookiest, craziest nuts you'll meet – there's no conformity in this. I mean, we're all over the map, right? Those are the drivers. Not, "Oh, in my case, I wanted to be part of a creative industry that made epic stories," you know. That's not necessarily why young people will want to get into the business anymore. I think the motivation has changed.
And, you know, it's like I think Arnold Schwarzenegger said this once: you know, lie to anybody, just don't lie to yourself. And I think that you have to be – for young people, it's really being honest with yourself. What do you really want? What are you looking for?
So the advice is: look at what really motivates you, number one, and think about what you're good at, not what your passion is. That's academic. Who cares what your passion is? Go do that in your spare time. Give me what you're good at. So if you're honest about that, and when I see these young people now – and you know, listen, I'm the oldest guy in every room – I look at these young people: Jesus, these people are smarter than me. Because they were, I think they were attracted for the right reasons.
I don't know if you're seeing that with the young people, but I like – for me, I think, oh, part of me goes, "Who really would want to get into this business now?" I think you have to get into this business for what it is and what it could be. I think we are going to attract a different kind of person than, say, 10, 15, 20 years ago. The motivation is changing, you know?
The Constant: Human Relationships
Rob: So, and that's where, for me, nostalgia doesn't work. The one constant, I would say, coming back to the human-first thing – still, for all this business is about relationships. I mean, it's about your relationship with your peers, your relationship with your leaders, your relationship with people who report to you. For a lot of us in this business, the relationship with the client. These are human relationships.
So not only is it constant, I actually think – and this is going to sound contradictory or maybe counter-logical – I actually think that's becoming more important. So, you know, if you are attracted to this business because of that, and how you work with other people, how you collaborate with people, how idea generation goes, how you sell, how you motivate – those are the kinds of things that seem to be constant. It doesn't matter if we're in the AI era or the desktop publishing era.
And when you think about some of the great spots that you – some of the great pieces of work either in print – like for instance, you know, we didn't talk about this, but the other big influence on me was a guy named George Lois. And not so much for the advertising work he did, but more because of the Esquire magazine covers he did with Andy Warhol, with Muhammad Ali with the arrows in Muhammad Ali, with Andy Warhol in the soup can. And you know, again, I don't know when this was – this is probably in the seventies.
I remember it because the message was so powerfully presented to you, so simply presented to you. And I think again, I mean, as our world gets more and more complicated, more and more data, more and more tech tools, aside from remembering that we're about humans here, don't forget to try to keep it as simple as possible. And I think sometimes we lose that and we get really complicated.
Rick: That brevity line should be, I think, at the top of every one of our briefs, little bit.
Final Thoughts: Embrace Change and Have Fun
Rob: I guess in closing, I would say there will be more change, a lot more. The plane really doesn't land. It doesn't land, right? So now we're talking about AI. There'll be more changes. So I would say, again, to young people, but also people who are mid-career and want to last in this business another 10, 15 years: accept it. Welcome it. Get used to it. Make it part of your routine in life, and stop pining for the past.
Thank God we had it, but we can only move forward. So just accept that things are going to change. Things are going to go upside down, sideways. Brace yourself. Get into it, outlast it, and try to have some fun. That's the other thing. Where's the fun in the business? Let's put some fun back in.
Rick: We are having fun here.
Rob: Well, absolutely. But the industry got so serious. It did. How did that happen? And where are all the crazies? When I started this business, it was full of crazies.
Rick: We're still here.
Rob: We need the right kind of crazy. That's what I'll, that's the thought I'll leave you with. We need the right kind of crazy.
Rick: Oh my God, I love it. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Rob: Hey, dude, it's my honor and I'm so happy that you're doing what you're doing for us with this show, with everything. Thanks Rick, and it was a pleasure being here. Cheers, man.
VML Canada Website:
VML Canada Website:
Gamification in Advertising: A Panel Discussion
Rick: Up next, we're going to talk about one of the most potentially disruptive innovations in advertising: gamification. This isn't just about making ads more fun. It has the power to actually redefine the relationship between a brand and its consumers. We're moving beyond passive ads into a world of active participation, where brands are building entire ecosystems powered by AI, real-time data, and interactive platforms, all designed to drive specific behavior. Today, we'll look at a few great examples of just that.
Case Study 1: Hydro-Quebec Mission 2035
Rick: Tim, let's start with the Hydro-Quebec example.
Tim: This one was a little bit of a surprise to me. I saw it at the award ceremony in Montreal when I was giving out some of the innovation awards for the agency. It's called Hydro-Quebec Mission 2035, and the highest level summary I can give is: an online web game to educate individuals about how to spend money to generate the needed electricity that they expect is needed in the next 10 years.
The concept is simple. If you've played any Civilization-style game, you have to build energy generation, energy storage, and distribution, right? Fundamentally, that's what you need for society, and you have all the known power-generating plants, whether it be hydro, wind, nuclear, coal – like all the different options. And it rates them: this is the cost, this is the output, this is the risk, this is all the other stuff, this is how long it takes.
And you get – I don't want to say points because it's not really points attributed – but your goal is to generate an additional, I think it's 9 million kilowatts over the next 10 years. You have to generate that much power by combining all the different scenarios, and you will, at some point, once you've reached that target, you get a score. It's like, "Hey, your infrastructure is very fragile to weather, very fragile to construction," or "It will generate the power, but it will take you 15 years to get there."
Because as an example, building a nuclear power plant is a 10-year exercise. Like it takes 10 years to build one within safety regulations in Canada to be able to generate power for a community. So to reach the required amount, you need to build like five of them. And if they each take 10 years, you're nowhere near the timeframe.
If you only do hydro, then you're damming up and causing natural disasters. If you only do wind power, it's too fragile to the climate – not enough wind in certain seasons, not enough whatever in certain seasons. All the different scenarios.
And the interesting aspect was the game itself is not new. The objective and the purpose of it was: "Hey, this is an education process for people who like to complain about the government." Everybody likes complaining about governments all the time because "I would've done things differently," right? Everybody knows that. Everybody does that. It's like, "I would've done this and I would've spent the money this way, and it would've decreased taxes for everybody."
But in reality, you're playing the game and they're giving you the information that they have themselves, theoretically, to make your own choices. And here's the outcome: you need to generate this much power because that's what society's going to need, no questions asked.
Rick: That's super smart. Did this one win in Innovation?
Tim: This one won the innovation award for, I think it was customer experience. Honestly, I don't remember the category it won in, but it was surprising to me. I had not seen it, and surprisingly, I'm in Montreal, I'm in Quebec. Hydro-Quebec is where I get my power from. I should have known these things. But I hadn't seen any of it.
Rick: What I love about this is that it takes a situation where, you know, people have probably very strong opinions about how things should work, and it kind of puts them in the driver's seat. And then they can actually try it out themselves and try some of those ideas that they might have and see how that kind of goes.
Tim: Well, everybody has the opinion, but now you have the information of, "Hey, building a wind turbine costs this much, and it generates this much power, and you can store it in this – this is what it costs to store that energy." So it was a very enlightening process. And like I said, the game itself wasn't unheard of. We've done Civilization games – they've been around for years and years and years. You can play them on your phone for everything from egg farmers to lumber mills to all of the things.
This was just a different way of doing it. But what was interesting and innovative and took me aback was how transparent they were in the information. And the curiosity was: was anybody able to produce a more efficient, more effective, more cost-effective solution than what Hydro-Quebec is proposing? Like, because you could learn from all of these combinations. And is there something that could have been done better? And would they have even learned from it?
Rick: I just learned from it because I was playing the game while we were talking about it and accidentally won. So I've solved all of Hydro-Quebec's problems.
Tim: Right. You've achieved the goal of generating the required power.
Playing Through the Game
Rick: I did. Every outcome – is it you do it at the high range of risk? At the high range of budget or at the high range of – what's that third category? Is it timeline or is it infrastructure? I forget what it was.
Tim: The third one was – but it was like, is it very risky? IE, if all you built was nuclear reactors, you are at risk of if something breaks down, that's a meltdown, right? We don't want a Chernobyl, we don't want any of those things. And while they generate power and they can be very good for certain reasons, there's reasons why you don't build them in areas that have huge natural disasters. There's a reason why you shouldn't build them on fault lines. There's a reason. There are reasons you do things. So I just don't remember what the third category was.
Rick: So at the end of the game, it gives you a chance to validate your choices. So it breaks down into GHG emissions, the cost, and then reliability. And my emissions are really low. Costs are right in the middle, and my reliability is about 80% here. And it's given me a caution saying that, you know, "Careful, your energy mix jeopardizes service reliability."
Tim: That's right. A lot of wind turbines and stuff like that for clean energy.
Rick: I did use some wind turbines and hydropower – energy-efficient, clean energy, but also the ones that are unreliable because they rely on water flow and wind. Which I don't know if anybody's seen the water levels the last couple years, but water levels are significantly lower in rivers and lakes than they have been historically. And this is not an energy podcast – we like to talk about the topics, but that's a factor that they have to play into for hydro turbines, right? If you don't have the water flow, they're not turning the turbines.
Rick: I think it would be great for any future politician – like if we created a set of games just like this and it was part of the campaign. It's like, you know, you've got the big debates and you've got the platforms, but then you have, you know, these little mini video games they have to play and win at before they're allowed to step into that role of the premier. You know, so they can't win on slogans like, you know, buck-a-beer and stuff like that. They have to win on actual, you know, actual policies. I love that idea.
Tim: Apparently Hydro-Quebec's plan was to generate between 1,600 and 1,800 megawatts, but I did like 5,000. So they might want to talk to me about how I did that.
Rick: Maybe. How did you beat their expectations within budget?
Tim: Right? Because every government project has been on target and on budget historically. That's what we're known for.
Rick: I have a couple that I'd love to send this to – that have a few views on how money should be spent in government. They need this for every aspect of government, every decision.
Tim: Oh my God.
The Results
Rick: Well that's amazing and I love this. And Tim, did they get some good results on this? Did it say in the case?
Tim: So results were significantly higher than expected. I don't know whether – so expected and hoped for are always two different numbers, right? So they've got a lot of people that joined, and a lot of – the best part is more than 70% of the people that did it said, leaving, that they learned more from the game than they expected.
So they came out of this with a, "Hey, I may not have all the answers, but I slightly understand why they're investing in this instead of this." Like if you are pro-hydro electricity versus wind turbines versus whatever, you might realize, "Oh, I didn't know that this is what the output of a nuclear reactor was, or a wind turbine farm or this."
And the fact that you're using metrics of education – I don't know about you, but that's not something we typically see. Our metrics typically are like, "Did this convert to purchases? Did this convert to acquisitions?" Like, no, this converted to, "Hey, I went to bed smarter today because I now understand why the government is choosing to spend $5 billion on X, Y, and Z instead of this other thing I thought."
Case Study 2: Samsung Mind Guardian
Rick: So the next case we're going to talk about is called the Mind Guardian, and it's by Samsung. The challenge that they're working to solve here is that, you know, people over 55 often avoid scary, stressful Alzheimer's tests. So as a result, the disease gets detected way too late.
So what they did is they created a fun video game for Samsung tablets called the Mind Guardian, and it secretly tests for early signs of Alzheimer's while the user's playing it. And it's a 3D open-world game designed by doctors and AI engineers. And as the person's playing it, the AI in it analyzes over 2,000 of their in-game behaviors – like memory and navigation – to spot cognitive decline. And it has like a 97% accuracy, which is incredible.
Jeremy: I think that's a great example of using gamification to, you know, obviously help in the actual healthcare industry. I think we know a lot – we're learning more about Alzheimer's and how Alzheimer's comes on. And we know that people who are more active – like their brain is more active – they tend to be able to survive longer with Alzheimer's or even, you know, stall, curb Alzheimer's as well in their later years.
So video games became a part of that. And obviously games didn't really exist when these older people were kids, so they don't really have the same aptitude to play games all the time like we do. So Samsung actually came out with a really interesting campaign to, you know, help create this culture around, you know, keeping your brain moving.
And I think we're finding that a lot of these devices that we're on all the time, you know, there's more and more that we can kind of mine from them in terms of data – even just about ourselves. And I think that's what Samsung has kind of hit on here.
Tim: I love the insight. And this is where so many great ideas come from. And it was just a simple question and they said, "What if a simple game could quietly screen for memory issues during normal gameplay?" It takes the crossword puzzle that we all used to do, or our parents used to do, and actually says, "Hey, you used to be significantly better at them. Like maybe there's a decline somewhere." Like all those mind puzzles and things that you've played for years are now – and I love the point, Rick – we're using the game or the tool, which is the game, to start detecting that, "Hey, there's a decline somewhere. Hey, there's cognitive issues, something's happening that didn't used to happen." And it becomes a baseline to compare it to, to start helping us in general.
Rick: When this was designed specifically for Gen X and older, which maybe we should start playing this game. This was a bullseye for Samsung though. Their tagline is "technology with purpose" and that's exactly what this is. So absolutely love it. Great job.
There are so many great examples of innovative gamification – like we could probably dedicate an entire separate podcast to just those. We'll look for more to include in the future, and if you have any favorites, please send them to us. We'd love to check them out.
Closing
Thanks again to Rob Guénette. We'll be back soon with another episode of Why Didn't I Think of That? Thanks for listening.
If you'd like to talk to the hosts of this program or any of the leadership at VML Canada, email us at innovation.canada@vml.com. Check out our show notes for even more details and links to the cases featured in this show. Please remember to follow and rate us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The views and opinions expressed on the show are solely those of the participants and do not reflect those of VML, WPP, or their respective affiliates or employees.
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Opening: At VML Canada, Human First Innovation is at the heart of everything we do. We are doers, innovators, and big thinkers dedicated to leading and inspiring what's next.
Opening quote from Rob Guénette: "We ought to shape it before it shapes us. I think that is the right healthy attitude."
Rick Brown: Welcome to "Why Didn't I Think of That?" This is our first episode of 2026, and we have a very special guest with us today. Rob Guénette is here. Rob is the CEO of VML Canada. He's an absolute legend in the advertising business and an incredible storyteller. So stay tuned for this – you're going to love it. And then right after that, we have a panel discussion about gamification with our host Jeremy Lens and Tim Voet.
Interview with Rob Guénette: From Brand Management to Agency Leadership
Rick: Welcome to the show, Rob. Do you want to maybe start with your background and how you got into advertising?
Rob: Sure. So I started my career at Unilever Canada as a client in brand management, and I was there for 14 years. Through that time period, I received the best business education I could ever have gotten. Unilever was amazing in those years. I started in '86 and left in '99, and was able to cross a lot of categories and learned a ton, worked with outstanding people.
Through that, though, I learned that I was really gravitating to one aspect of the job more than the others, and that was the advertising piece. I loved working in the communication area. I loved working with agencies. I loved doing work that the public saw, that impacted our brand and all that stuff. And I decided at one point I wanted to do two things: I wanted to work in advertising, so I'd cross the bridge, and I also wanted to be an owner. I wanted to have an equity stake. So those were my two objectives.
Rick: That's pretty ambitious, right?
Rob: It was. Well, I was at that stage in my life where I was super confident, I was ambitious, and I just wanted to get on with it. And I thought, if it happens, great. If it doesn't happen, you know, I'm happy. I have a good career, I have fun, I work with great people. But I got pretty lucky, and it happened.
The VML Connection
Rob: So what happened was, my first introduction to VML was at a dinner held at Peter Stringham's house in New York shortly after we sold. And he invited myself, my wife, Paul and Jane. And at that dinner was a man named John Cook. This was in 2010. And I met John Cook at that dinner and I was so impressed with John. He's amazing. And I was in awe of the VML trajectory.
And by the way, a little factoid: VML was born in 1992, same year as Taxi. So Taxi was born in Montreal in 1992, VML was born in Kansas City in 1992. Amazing.
So back then, there was a period of time where I would attend meetings in New York that Martin Sorrell chaired, and John Cook would also be attending those meetings. So I got to see John in action. I got to hear about VML. I would do my bit on Taxi, but really we were there because Telus was one of the largest accounts in North America at that time for WPP. It was a big account. It was massive.
So through that introduction, I was always an admirer of VML. And of course, VML was on a different track than Taxi. Taxi was a pure creative shop, really, and VML really started in digital and tech, and solving client problems in different ways – not necessarily through TV and outdoor and all that stuff. It was really wired differently, pun intended.
The Decision to Merge Taxi into VML Canada
Rob: So I always thought – well, first of all, I should say Taxi after the acquisition was a bit of a corporate orphan, right? Two things happened. One, we were attached to the VML system, so I reported to John Cook, and they were great with us. We were integrated, we were on all the global calls. We were part of all of it.
But at one point, I guess I had a moment, sort of one of those epiphanies, and I said, you know, VML's growing and the world is changing fast. They seem to be in the right lane. I thought it was time to change our direction with Taxi. And as you know, there was an opportunity that came up. There was a merger between VML and Y&R, and so at that moment in time, I said, you know what? I'd rather retire Taxi while it's still strong, while it's still great, and decided that it's time to put VML Canada on the map. And that was a manifestation of putting Taxi and WT together as Wunderman Thompson.
And that was a difficult, but I think necessary decision to really go where the growth was and go where the future is. Because I come at things a little bit more left-brain because of my background and how I grew up in business. And also as a person, I'm just not that nostalgic and I'm just not that emotional.
So for me, the way I looked at it, it was important to retain the spirit of Taxi, which lives every day, as you know, at VML Canada – as opposed to just the nomenclature, the naming. And again, I've seen in my – I've been around now 40 years – for me it's about how do we grow, how do we keep all our great people in place? How does everybody get stimulated, learn, and challenged and motivated, right?
And I just at that time thought the VML thing is going to be that thing for us. It's going to offer more career opportunities. I mean, VML is the largest agency in the world – 30,000-plus employees. And of course, as you know, the capabilities we have up and down is insane. So you're going to learn new capabilities, you're going to approach modern marketing in a different way and all that. So that was part of my thinking: how do I, as opposed to trying to keep a brand alive or reinvent a brand or whatever you want to call it, how do I make sure that the best people we have continue to be motivated, stimulated, intellectually stimulated, and future-proofed, if there is such a thing?
So that was part of it. Plus, here's the other thing: I just love change. I'm one of those weird guys.
Rick: Really? Well, now is your time.
Rob: Exactly. But I love it. I love change.
What Change Looks Like at VML Canada
Rick: What's change for you now? Well, how do we work now? That's completely different from before, or is it?
Rob: It is and it isn't, and I'll explain how I look at it. I referred to earlier the spirit of Taxi, and I see VML Canada – its creative soul comes from Taxi. Our ability to challenge status quo internally and externally is still alive. However, I see VML Canada, and I don't mean this with any disrespect to my old Taxi and Paul and Jane and everybody – everybody was there, Ron Wilson, Andrew Simon, all of us – I just think we're more sophisticated now.
I think we can show up no matter what the business problem is. We don't have to white label anything. We don't have to think, "Oh geez, we'll fake it till we make it," all that stuff, right? I just think we have more components. We're firing on many more cylinders. We're more sophisticated. There's more rigor in data, in AI, the whole nine yards, right?
So I think that my objective was – and I think you were in the audience when I said this – my objective was not to sort of take bits of Taxi and bits of Wunderman Thompson, put that in a blender and hit puree and hope something positive comes out. My objective was to start a new culture – and only take the essence of what was really great about Taxi and the essence of what was really great about Wunderman Thompson. So in other words, marry the artists and the geeks. It had to be a new culture.
But the other thing, the other benefit I see that has actually materialized – and I was hoping for this, and it's happened – because, you know, our guiding principle at VML Canada is: Proudly global. Fiercely local.
Now the global piece, as you know, we work on global pieces of business. We're invited to global pitches as VML Canada that otherwise wouldn't be there if we weren't in this fantastic network. And I'm telling you, some of the stuff is just insane. We're working on it or we're pitching that – that's crazy, man. I can't believe it, right?
And then locally, we show up, and I just think we're literally – I know this is going to sound so cliche – but we're literally getting the best of both worlds. And Graham Lang, as you know because you work for him, Graham is one of these CCOs – he's a citizen of the world. He made his bones in Cape Town and in London, and now obviously he's a big part of our business in Canada. I mean, for guys like that, for people like that, having one foot in the global arena and one foot in a local arena is the best case scenario. It's awesome.
Rick: He always has such a big perspective on things. It's amazing to have him here.
Rob: It's so cool. And so, you know, the nature of our business – I was just mentioning to someone walking in here, you know, working in this business, it's like watching the weather. Wait 10 minutes, it'll change. We have to be geared that we can't not only not be afraid of change, we have to run towards it. Not only can we not be afraid of conflict, we have to run towards it. If you don't have that mindset, you'll either stagnate or die, and neither of those options is very good.
So, you know, we're very lucky. I'm lucky, we're lucky at VML Canada that the leadership group is so tight. I love working with these people. They're awesome. And they all have the same mindset: whatever comes our way, we're going to win.
AI and the Future of Advertising
Rick: Speaking of things coming our way, what are your thoughts on AI and how it's changing the business?
Rob: In a way, I've seen this movie already – in a way. Now not as dramatic as AI, but the industry has gone through significant changes over the years, right? And I think what happens is when something as powerful and new and so dramatic as AI happens, the pendulum swings really hard. Really hard. But it is my belief that eventually things do reach equilibrium. That is to say that the pendulum swings back and it finds its right calibration.
So I think what we're going to see in the short term is an over-indexing on AI and how it's used. And thank God for super users like yourself and Jeremy and others, right? Because what you do – and remember what we talked about before, this healthy tension – I think the best outcome is going to be, in its equilibrium state, this healthy tension between the human element and the artificial element.
And I think that anybody who thinks that AI is going to dominate, I think is wrong. I think it's going to be yet another powerful tool, like many other tools that came before it. And you, again, you don't let your short-term greed interfere with your long-term greed. We all have to understand AI and become some level of a user – in your case, a super user. But this will be a part of the overall story. Eventually. Right now it's the story.
You know, there's a lot of AI slop going on, and I'm telling you that can backfire. That's exactly what it is. We ought to shape it before it shapes us. I think that's the right healthy attitude.
Rick: That needs to be our new tagline.
Finding the Right Balance
Rob: You know, I think that's the right way to approach it, and probably means you're going to have a long, healthy career. I really do think that when these new technologies come to bear, it's almost like everybody's rushing without thinking towards it. I mean, we need a certain amount of people to do that because we need to learn it. And there are certain groups – of which you are here at VML Canada – that over-index on it to learn it and then put it in its proper place. You gotta go too far before you realize, "Oh, okay."
Exactly. You know, and I think that like anything else, there are going to be mistakes made. There are going to be times where you pushed it too far, but I think that's part of the process of learning it. If you're not doing that, then you're really not taking the right kind of risk. You're not pushing it far enough.
And I think for me, and I just talked about this in a meeting yesterday, for me it's not about the mistake – you know, be it in the slop, some of the slop we're seeing, and other manifestations of it. To me it's not that. To me it's: What do you do in the recovery? How much did you learn? How effective is the recovery? How elegant, how quick is it? That's where the magic happens – not pushing the boundaries. No, that's not the magic. You need to do that in order to learn the other bits.
What's going to last is the human element that will never be lost. I don't care how powerful AI gets. As just a reminder, when we're doing things, we're trying to get people to change behavior. We're trying to get people to buy stuff, we're trying to get people to donate, we're trying to get people to do all kinds of things, right, in our effort to have effective communication.
So if all you're doing is chasing the technology, you're losing the real reason why the technology is in our business in the first place. Otherwise we'll lose sight of what we're really about, because we're not a tech company. Tech is part of our company, but we're not a tech company. We have to remember what the parts that make us good are, and AI and tech is one of the parts now.
Advice for Young People Entering the Industry
Rick: With all of that, what advice would you have for new people considering this?
Rob: So I would say to young people: the good old days are right now. They're right now. And one of the things that Paul Lavoie and I used to talk about a lot is don't look in the rear view mirror. In fact, at one point we took the rear view mirror off our cars just to make the point: don't look, just keep looking forward.
And I think that for young people, it's more about how you're built. And if you are the type of person that wants to have an adrenaline rush, that loves change, that wants to be in an environment with the kookiest, craziest nuts you'll meet – there's no conformity in this. I mean, we're all over the map, right? Those are the drivers. Not, "Oh, in my case, I wanted to be part of a creative industry that made epic stories," you know. That's not necessarily why young people will want to get into the business anymore. I think the motivation has changed.
And, you know, it's like I think Arnold Schwarzenegger said this once: you know, lie to anybody, just don't lie to yourself. And I think that you have to be – for young people, it's really being honest with yourself. What do you really want? What are you looking for?
So the advice is: look at what really motivates you, number one, and think about what you're good at, not what your passion is. That's academic. Who cares what your passion is? Go do that in your spare time. Give me what you're good at. So if you're honest about that, and when I see these young people now – and you know, listen, I'm the oldest guy in every room – I look at these young people: Jesus, these people are smarter than me. Because they were, I think they were attracted for the right reasons.
I don't know if you're seeing that with the young people, but I like – for me, I think, oh, part of me goes, "Who really would want to get into this business now?" I think you have to get into this business for what it is and what it could be. I think we are going to attract a different kind of person than, say, 10, 15, 20 years ago. The motivation is changing, you know?
The Constant: Human Relationships
Rob: So, and that's where, for me, nostalgia doesn't work. The one constant, I would say, coming back to the human-first thing – still, for all this business is about relationships. I mean, it's about your relationship with your peers, your relationship with your leaders, your relationship with people who report to you. For a lot of us in this business, the relationship with the client. These are human relationships.
So not only is it constant, I actually think – and this is going to sound contradictory or maybe counter-logical – I actually think that's becoming more important. So, you know, if you are attracted to this business because of that, and how you work with other people, how you collaborate with people, how idea generation goes, how you sell, how you motivate – those are the kinds of things that seem to be constant. It doesn't matter if we're in the AI era or the desktop publishing era.
And when you think about some of the great spots that you – some of the great pieces of work either in print – like for instance, you know, we didn't talk about this, but the other big influence on me was a guy named George Lois. And not so much for the advertising work he did, but more because of the Esquire magazine covers he did with Andy Warhol, with Muhammad Ali with the arrows in Muhammad Ali, with Andy Warhol in the soup can. And you know, again, I don't know when this was – this is probably in the seventies.
I remember it because the message was so powerfully presented to you, so simply presented to you. And I think again, I mean, as our world gets more and more complicated, more and more data, more and more tech tools, aside from remembering that we're about humans here, don't forget to try to keep it as simple as possible. And I think sometimes we lose that and we get really complicated.
Rick: That brevity line should be, I think, at the top of every one of our briefs, little bit.
Final Thoughts: Embrace Change and Have Fun
Rob: I guess in closing, I would say there will be more change, a lot more. The plane really doesn't land. It doesn't land, right? So now we're talking about AI. There'll be more changes. So I would say, again, to young people, but also people who are mid-career and want to last in this business another 10, 15 years: accept it. Welcome it. Get used to it. Make it part of your routine in life, and stop pining for the past.
Thank God we had it, but we can only move forward. So just accept that things are going to change. Things are going to go upside down, sideways. Brace yourself. Get into it, outlast it, and try to have some fun. That's the other thing. Where's the fun in the business? Let's put some fun back in.
Rick: We are having fun here.
Rob: Well, absolutely. But the industry got so serious. It did. How did that happen? And where are all the crazies? When I started this business, it was full of crazies.
Rick: We're still here.
Rob: We need the right kind of crazy. That's what I'll, that's the thought I'll leave you with. We need the right kind of crazy.
Rick: Oh my God, I love it. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Rob: Hey, dude, it's my honor and I'm so happy that you're doing what you're doing for us with this show, with everything. Thanks Rick, and it was a pleasure being here. Cheers, man.
https://www.vml.com/vml-canada
Gamification in Advertising: A Panel Discussion
Rick: Up next, we're going to talk about one of the most potentially disruptive innovations in advertising: gamification. This isn't just about making ads more fun. It has the power to actually redefine the relationship between a brand and its consumers. We're moving beyond passive ads into a world of active participation, where brands are building entire ecosystems powered by AI, real-time data, and interactive platforms, all designed to drive specific behavior. Today, we'll look at a few great examples of just that.
Case Study 1: Hydro-Quebec Mission 2035
https://mission2035.hydroquebec.com/en
https://lg2.com/en/our-work/hydro-quebec-simulating-the-future-of-energy
Rick: Tim, let's start with the Hydro-Quebec example.
Tim: This one was a little bit of a surprise to me. I saw it at the award ceremony in Montreal when I was giving out some of the innovation awards for the agency. It's called Hydro-Quebec Mission 2035, and the highest level summary I can give is: an online web game to educate individuals about how to spend money to generate the needed electricity that they expect is needed in the next 10 years.
The concept is simple. If you've played any Civilization-style game, you have to build energy generation, energy storage, and distribution, right? Fundamentally, that's what you need for society, and you have all the known power-generating plants, whether it be hydro, wind, nuclear, coal – like all the different options. And it rates them: this is the cost, this is the output, this is the risk, this is all the other stuff, this is how long it takes.
And you get – I don't want to say points because it's not really points attributed – but your goal is to generate an additional, I think it's 9 million kilowatts over the next 10 years. You have to generate that much power by combining all the different scenarios, and you will, at some point, once you've reached that target, you get a score. It's like, "Hey, your infrastructure is very fragile to weather, very fragile to construction," or "It will generate the power, but it will take you 15 years to get there."
Because as an example, building a nuclear power plant is a 10-year exercise. Like it takes 10 years to build one within safety regulations in Canada to be able to generate power for a community. So to reach the required amount, you need to build like five of them. And if they each take 10 years, you're nowhere near the timeframe.
If you only do hydro, then you're damming up and causing natural disasters. If you only do wind power, it's too fragile to the climate – not enough wind in certain seasons, not enough whatever in certain seasons. All the different scenarios.
And the interesting aspect was the game itself is not new. The objective and the purpose of it was: "Hey, this is an education process for people who like to complain about the government." Everybody likes complaining about governments all the time because "I would've done things differently," right? Everybody knows that. Everybody does that. It's like, "I would've done this and I would've spent the money this way, and it would've decreased taxes for everybody."
But in reality, you're playing the game and they're giving you the information that they have themselves, theoretically, to make your own choices. And here's the outcome: you need to generate this much power because that's what society's going to need, no questions asked.
Rick: That's super smart. Did this one win in Innovation?
Tim: This one won the innovation award for, I think it was customer experience. Honestly, I don't remember the category it won in, but it was surprising to me. I had not seen it, and surprisingly, I'm in Montreal, I'm in Quebec. Hydro-Quebec is where I get my power from. I should have known these things. But I hadn't seen any of it.
Rick: What I love about this is that it takes a situation where, you know, people have probably very strong opinions about how things should work, and it kind of puts them in the driver's seat. And then they can actually try it out themselves and try some of those ideas that they might have and see how that kind of goes.
Tim: Well, everybody has the opinion, but now you have the information of, "Hey, building a wind turbine costs this much, and it generates this much power, and you can store it in this – this is what it costs to store that energy." So it was a very enlightening process. And like I said, the game itself wasn't unheard of. We've done Civilization games – they've been around for years and years and years. You can play them on your phone for everything from egg farmers to lumber mills to all of the things.
This was just a different way of doing it. But what was interesting and innovative and took me aback was how transparent they were in the information. And the curiosity was: was anybody able to produce a more efficient, more effective, more cost-effective solution than what Hydro-Quebec is proposing? Like, because you could learn from all of these combinations. And is there something that could have been done better? And would they have even learned from it?
Rick: I just learned from it because I was playing the game while we were talking about it and accidentally won. So I've solved all of Hydro-Quebec's problems.
Tim: Right. You've achieved the goal of generating the required power.
Playing Through the Game
Rick: I did. Every outcome – is it you do it at the high range of risk? At the high range of budget or at the high range of – what's that third category? Is it timeline or is it infrastructure? I forget what it was.
Tim: The third one was – but it was like, is it very risky? IE, if all you built was nuclear reactors, you are at risk of if something breaks down, that's a meltdown, right? We don't want a Chernobyl, we don't want any of those things. And while they generate power and they can be very good for certain reasons, there's reasons why you don't build them in areas that have huge natural disasters. There's a reason why you shouldn't build them on fault lines. There's a reason. There are reasons you do things. So I just don't remember what the third category was.
Rick: So at the end of the game, it gives you a chance to validate your choices. So it breaks down into GHG emissions, the cost, and then reliability. And my emissions are really low. Costs are right in the middle, and my reliability is about 80% here. And it's given me a caution saying that, you know, "Careful, your energy mix jeopardizes service reliability."
Tim: That's right. A lot of wind turbines and stuff like that for clean energy.
Rick: I did use some wind turbines and hydropower – energy-efficient, clean energy, but also the ones that are unreliable because they rely on water flow and wind. Which I don't know if anybody's seen the water levels the last couple years, but water levels are significantly lower in rivers and lakes than they have been historically. And this is not an energy podcast – we like to talk about the topics, but that's a factor that they have to play into for hydro turbines, right? If you don't have the water flow, they're not turning the turbines.
Rick: I think it would be great for any future politician – like if we created a set of games just like this and it was part of the campaign. It's like, you know, you've got the big debates and you've got the platforms, but then you have, you know, these little mini video games they have to play and win at before they're allowed to step into that role of the premier. You know, so they can't win on slogans like, you know, buck-a-beer and stuff like that. They have to win on actual, you know, actual policies. I love that idea.
Tim: Apparently Hydro-Quebec's plan was to generate between 1,600 and 1,800 megawatts, but I did like 5,000. So they might want to talk to me about how I did that.
Rick: Maybe. How did you beat their expectations within budget?
Tim: Right? Because every government project has been on target and on budget historically. That's what we're known for.
Rick: I have a couple that I'd love to send this to – that have a few views on how money should be spent in government. They need this for every aspect of government, every decision.
Tim: Oh my God.
The Results
Rick: Well that's amazing and I love this. And Tim, did they get some good results on this? Did it say in the case?
Tim: So results were significantly higher than expected. I don't know whether – so expected and hoped for are always two different numbers, right? So they've got a lot of people that joined, and a lot of – the best part is more than 70% of the people that did it said, leaving, that they learned more from the game than they expected.
So they came out of this with a, "Hey, I may not have all the answers, but I slightly understand why they're investing in this instead of this." Like if you are pro-hydro electricity versus wind turbines versus whatever, you might realize, "Oh, I didn't know that this is what the output of a nuclear reactor was, or a wind turbine farm or this."
And the fact that you're using metrics of education – I don't know about you, but that's not something we typically see. Our metrics typically are like, "Did this convert to purchases? Did this convert to acquisitions?" Like, no, this converted to, "Hey, I went to bed smarter today because I now understand why the government is choosing to spend $5 billion on X, Y, and Z instead of this other thing I thought."
Case Study 2: Samsung Mind Guardian
https://lbbonline.com/news/cheil-samsung-mind-guardian
Rick: So the next case we're going to talk about is called the Mind Guardian, and it's by Samsung. The challenge that they're working to solve here is that, you know, people over 55 often avoid scary, stressful Alzheimer's tests. So as a result, the disease gets detected way too late.
So what they did is they created a fun video game for Samsung tablets called the Mind Guardian, and it secretly tests for early signs of Alzheimer's while the user's playing it. And it's a 3D open-world game designed by doctors and AI engineers. And as the person's playing it, the AI in it analyzes over 2,000 of their in-game behaviors – like memory and navigation – to spot cognitive decline. And it has like a 97% accuracy, which is incredible.
I think that's a great example of using gamification to, you know, obviously help in the actual healthcare industry. I think we know a lot – we're learning more about Alzheimer's and how Alzheimer's comes on. And we know that people who are more active – like their brain is more active – they tend to be able to survive longer with Alzheimer's or even, you know, stall, curb Alzheimer's as well in their later years.
So video games became a part of that. And obviously games didn't really exist when these older people were kids, so they don't really have the same aptitude to play games all the time like we do. So Samsung actually came out with a really interesting campaign to, you know, help create this culture around, you know, keeping your brain moving.
And I think we're finding that a lot of these devices that we're on all the time, you know, there's more and more that we can kind of mine from them in terms of data – even just about ourselves. And I think that's what Samsung has kind of hit on here.
Tim: I love the insight. And this is where so many great ideas come from. And it was just a simple question and they said, "What if a simple game could quietly screen for memory issues during normal gameplay?" It takes the crossword puzzle that we all used to do, or our parents used to do, and actually says, "Hey, you used to be significantly better at them. Like maybe there's a decline somewhere." Like all those mind puzzles and things that you've played for years are now – and I love the point, Rick – we're using the game or the tool, which is the game, to start detecting that, "Hey, there's a decline somewhere. Hey, there's cognitive issues, something's happening that didn't used to happen." And it becomes a baseline to compare it to, to start helping us in general.
Rick: When this was designed specifically for Gen X and older, which maybe we should start playing this game. This was a bullseye for Samsung though. Their tagline is "technology with purpose" and that's exactly what this is. So absolutely love it. Great job.
There are so many great examples of innovative gamification – like we could probably dedicate an entire separate podcast to just those. We'll look for more to include in the future, and if you have any favorites, please send them to us. We'd love to check them out.
Closing
Thanks again to Rob Guénette. We'll be back soon with another episode of Why Didn't I Think of That? Thanks for listening.
If you'd like to talk to the hosts of this program or any of the leadership at VML Canada, email us at innovation.canada@vml.com. Check out our show notes for even more details and links to the cases featured in this show. Please remember to follow and rate us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The views and opinions expressed on the show are solely those of the participants and do not reflect those of VML, WPP, or their respective affiliates or employees.