GIANT Reflections: Our First Canadian Marketing Award Win!

On Friday, November 10th at approximately 9 pm in Toronto’s Westin Harbour Castle Hotel, the very unexpected happened. A little emerging agency from 2 hours down Highway 401, beat out global agency heavyweights such as Wavemaker Global, and Leo Burnett to win the GOLD Canadian Marketing Award for Brand Building in the category of Healthcare for the London Health Sciences Foundation’s Faces of Heroes campaign.

The CMA Awards celebrate the best in Canadian marketing and recognize the top campaigns and marketers from across the country, and GIANT Creative turned out to be the little agency that could.

I can’t explain to you the incredible mix of shock & pride that quickly escaped the mouths of everyone at our table as we jumped up from our seats and speed-walked to the big stage to accept our award in front of our peers and mentors.

It was a little over 3 years ago that GIANT Creative was born. At the time we had 5 staff members – 2 part-time – and were earnestly serving our 5 local clients.

In those early days, we were a content-marketing agency producing video & static content to be handed off to our client’s internal/external marketing teams – but from day one, we had the vision to build a full-service marketing agency that would combine our GIANT creative with GIANT strategy & execution. We no longer were satisfied with wanting to hand off the content we produced, for other marketers to execute on – we wanted that work to start staying in-house.

Like many start-up agencies, we hustled our asses off, worked ungodly hours (actually, that’s the same today), and our sweat equity resulted in steadily growing in both clients and team.

Today we are 30+ strong in team members, recruiting more and more great talent to our team, while proudly serving regional & national brands from both sides of the border. Anyone who works in a successful marketing agency knows that the days, weeks and months can all bleed into one another, and there’s no such thing as a 40-hour work week.

That’s what made that Friday night in Toronto so special. A wonderful reminder that all the long, purposeful days mattered. That striving for success for our clients is the worthy cause that gets us up and running every single day.

Congratulations to our GIANT team and to our amazing client partners like London Health Sciences Foundation who give us a seat at the table, so we can work together to build a Gold CMA Award Winning Campaign.