Philter Communications, Toronto :: Advertising & Marketing Agency ::

This is unphiltered. It’s a place where the members of Philter Communications and Philter Retail post a monthly feature on a Trend or Insight that we see having a big impact on our clients or on the design and advertising industry as a whole. It’s also a place where we share our weekly creative brainstorm – Word. You can also find out what we’re reading, listening to and look at the things that we’re talking about in the studio. After years of working with clients to build strategies for their brands, advertising, social media and collateral we’ve got a lot of knowledge and this seems like the perfect place to share. So join our conversation and share our experiences in the unphiltered world.

Crowdsourcing the brand

Outsourcing – the method of shipping a job to an external provider – has polarized those in business who believe it is either a) beneficial in a cost-effective sense or b) damaging to employee stability.
Crowdsourcing provides a similar dilemma – detailing a clash between the accelerated creativity of crowdsourced minds, and businesses’ economic need to [...]

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How Video Can Save Retail

Regardless of a shopper’s intention, they need guidance. It’s not often that one purchases without turning to advice from a higher being – or should we say a more experienced one. Fearing pressure from advertisers, many are now turning to people just like themselves to help them figure out what the advantages of specific products [...]

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Limited Edition

Admit it, you want what you cannot have. It’s the first thing you notice when kids play in a sandbox together. It happens in high school over friends, lovers and running shoes. And it’s a driving force behind a lot of commerce. It’s not, “I need that.” It’s, “I want what she’s got.”
A few weeks [...]

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Be a man.

I was out with a single male friend of mine the other day and he said something interesting about looking for a girlfriend: “I want a marketing partner, not a COO.” And this then turned into a larger conversation about how men, in the media and in general have lost their balls. And it’s true. [...]

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Luxury Vending

At Philter Retail we’re always looking for new ways to interact with shoppers and to bring our clients’ products to the forefront. Things like toothpaste, deodorant and feminine-hygiene are not out-of-the-ordinary products to find in a vending machine – although, you can disrupt the experience by placing the vending machines in extraordinary spaces.
But what I’m [...]

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Authentic

Today’s word is: Authentic.
I’ve been doing a lot of research around a new unphiltered blog post on brand exclusivity and opacity. The idea being that a brand (or an experience) must remain exclusive in order to keep its mystique. The common thread is that everything seems to hover around the idea of authenticity.
In fashion, Burberry [...]

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Touch

Touch.
This week in the unphiltered blog our word is Touch. There are a few things that made me think of this. One, the release of the iPad has got the Philter web design team all excited. And why not? The increase in touch technology is just so interesting and is really changing the way that [...]

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Name

So what is in a name? From the perspective of a branding professional – everything. When the Philter Brand Unit takes on a naming project there are so many things that we think about: Is it going to be a made up word like Snapple? Is it going to be personal like Kinko’s (a nickname [...]

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Senses

This morning I caught a brief scent of Spring. And for those of you who live in cold climates you understand that feeling. For me, it starts off in the pit of my belly. It feels like excitement and nervous energy. Like the anticipation I used to feel as a child staring out the window [...]

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