On October 24, London, England’s WPP Group PLC announced that it had acquired Blast for an undisclosed sum. Ordinarily the top executive is the first to go following an acquisition; after all, there isn’t usually room for two CEOs. But Caer was assured that Blast will continue to operate intact as a division of Wunderman, the marketing division of WPP.
The Blast acquisition may not rank alongside Crystal Decisions and Creo in size, although Blast does employ 350 people and boasted a respectable $41.8 million in 2006 revenue. But it marks a milestone in Vancouver’s tech sector. The little Web-development company founded by a group of recent film-school graduates in 1997 somehow navigated a course through the dot-com implosion to become a sophisticated online marketing agency with clients such as Nike, Whirlpool and Starbucks. Along the way it helped define a whole new industry – and put Vancouver on the map as a pioneer.
What were you doing before you came to Vancouver to go to film school?
I was in France, working at Ernst and Young as an accountant auditor and having a tremendous amount of fun. So much so that I decided to buy a one-way ticket, pay my taxes, and come to school here in Vancouver.
When you and your friends started Blast, did you envision a $40-million company with 350 employees?
Absolutely! It was all planned. [laughter] But we did have high expectations. I remember one of the first meetings we had as a group of founders was to sit down and spell out what our dreams were for Blast, and they were pretty big dreams, including to be a household name. And those dreams are what kept us going in the dark times.
You survived the dot-com bubble bursting – what lessons did you take away from that?
The first lesson was to cut through the hype of the day. There were business plans landing on our desks for the next big dot-com start-up, and we shied away from them because they just didn’t make any sense. We survived because we had built relationships with what used to be called “old economy” companies at the time, like Nike and Nintendo. Those guys continued to invest in Internet marketing and customer relationships, so when everything crashed in the dot-com arena these guys kept going.
Corporate culture was the big buzz back then – the casual dress code, the beer fridge… A lot of that went by the wayside during the shakeout, but Blast seems to have retained its culture as a fun place to work. How?
When we went to Hawaii with the entire company in 1999 and 2000, we had more than 100 people from around the world in Hawaii for three or four days. From a certain perspective, it probably looked a little crazy. But I can tell you seven or eight years later, that was one of the defining moments of the company culturally. It filled up the goodwill tank very significantly.
We can’t do that anymore because we now have 400 or so employees, so it’s not practically possible. But we focus on things that are more scalable. For example, after three years of employment, you have an extra month off, so every fourth year you’re going to get seven weeks off.
Nothing really quite matched Hawaii, but we’re constantly looking for ways to maintain that culture, because when there is a tough project or difficult times to get through, that’s when you tap into that tank of goodwill.
Did you always consider an acquisition a possibility? Was there a point at which it seemed an inevitability?
We were approached quite regularly for the last five or six years. We politely sat down and listened and truly assessed whether it would make sense. But the mission was not to make a quick buck; if it was, we would have sold in 1999 or 2000, or tried to go public back then – and probably crashed
later. But last year when we started to look at our future, we realized that we had to change. Over the next two to five years, it would have become more difficult for us to remain one of the top agencies in the world without partnering in some way with another entity.
Ten or 20 years down the road, what role do you see yourself playing in Vancouver’s tech or marketing community?
There is a very interesting opportunity here, because one of the things Vancouver is known for is its digital-media competency. And many times, when people hear “digital media,” they hear “games.” But in fact there is a gigantic revolution happening in marketing. Globally, marketing is probably 10 times bigger than video games, and there are brand new skill sets required to deliver those marketing solutions in this digital world. Vancouver has been growing and nurturing digital-media competencies for a while, and there’s a huge shortage of talent worldwide.
It must have been exciting to watch this sector grow in Vancouver from basically nothing to a talent pool for the world.
Yes, absolutely. One of the ways we’ve been able to grow is to tap into talent worldwide, and Vancouver is very attractive for worldwide talent, particularly when the U.S. is sending negative messages to immigrants and to worldwide talent. I hope that Vancouver will continue to tap into both that open mindset toward immigration and world talent, and digital media on the other hand. If you combine the two, we’ll do great.
Any immediate personal plans to celebrate this milestone?
The celebration lasted about eight seconds. We have another couple of months here of figuring out how things are going to work out. There are lots of new people to meet at Wunderman and WPP, and we were already in the middle of planning our next year anyway, with or without WPP. So it’s not really a good time of year to take a break.
