In the perfect example of how sometimes a million-dollar idea is worth more than a million-dollar budget, Bread Agency has developed a creative approach to the job hiring process: mock, out-of-home advertisements for the positions.
For Bread Agency, a social media agency still in its infancy, the recruitment process required more creativity to ensure that suitable candidates were applying. Working with a creative director over just a few days and using no AI, the team developed the out-of-home mock-ups that would become the basis of the campaign. “We like to do things differently, and we don’t like splashing $70,000 in an outdoor campaign,” said Amaury Treguer, co-founder of Bread Agency.
With creativity at the core of all the agency’s activities, the idea was to create something that would incorporate that into the communications without blowing a year’s worth of marketing budget in one go. “This person needs to bring creativity, so we wanted to attract that kind of person with a creative job post. You see such a difference in the commentary and conversation on the post but also in some of the job submissions where people matched the creativity that we put out in the post,” said Mary Proulx, co-founder of Bread Agency.
The response was unprecedented, with candidates going above and beyond to hit the same level of creativity that was offered by the ad itself. “A lot of the candidates were saying, ‘I want to work with you now.’ I think what we were trying to do was give them an understanding of the culture and what it is to work for Bread,” Treguer said.
There is an interesting lesson to be learned in this kind of marketing: do not be lazy and connect exclusively with the audience you are trying to reach, no matter the nature of the campaign. “We want to show that we care about what you’re about to do by putting some care into crafting the things that we are looking for and giving them the right idea of the type of person we want to attract,” said Proulx.
For Bread, the campaign has doubled as a promotional campaign for the agency itself, with a lot of commentary around the ads asking, “Who are these people?” and then taking the time to look further into what the agency does – getting its name out there.
Having initially met while working at Havas, Treger & Proulx knew they wanted to “do their own thing.” With a background in strategy and production relating to influencer and content marketing, the pair created the social media agency Bread in 2022, “the kind of agency that they always wanted to work for.”
Working with world-class clients like P&O Cruises, Modibodi and Zambrero, Bread focuses on social commerce, not just on the reach metrics or likes a brand is getting but also on how social impacts its bottom line from a sales and business objective perspective. “We want to be an amazing place to work, so we are looking at what that looks like to create a best-in-class workplace in an agency setting,” Proulx said.
