Want to know more about Rhyme + Reason?
Read along as founder Tyler Macleod asks himself the important questions.

‍

Why start an agency?
I have no other marketable skills. I briefly considered carpentry—get in on the labour shortage, y’know—but after hanging a door last year, I changed my mind.

Right, but you could just keep working in an established agency. Why start your own?
This is a popular question. I ran into a former agency owner last month and told him I was starting an agency. His reply was, “What for?” So, that was encouraging.

When I got into the agency business, I knew immediately it was the career path for me. I loved it from day one. And it wasn’t long after that I knew I wanted to have my own agency someday. I admired what several local agency principals had done and liked the idea of carrying forward many of the positives I took from working for them.

In 2009, I set a goal of being an agency owner by age 40. I’m 43 now. For the last seven years, I was in a great situation in my role at M5: I had a lot of respect for the agency partners. They gave me plenty of freedom to run the day-to-day operations of the Halifax office. The clients were great and the team was outstanding. We had a lot of success. All of that helped me kick the age-40 goal down the road. But once we got through the turmoil of the pandemic years and things returned to “business as usual” the entrepreneurial thoughts came back. And they started to have a “now or never” feeling to them.

So… you launched this agency to stick to some kind of arbitrary schedule? Not out of a passionate founding belief?
I came up as an account manager. Schedules are important.

Inspiring. So, what’s with the name, Rhyme + Reason?
The name is born out of my frustration with the direction the marketing profession is taking. You’ve got a growing number of professionals who swear by data-driven marketing decisions and you’ve got another crowd who insist the profession is an art. It’s perfectly normal and healthy to have advocates with differing viewpoints. But what I find frustrating is that, overwhelmingly, there’s very little willingness for either camp to consider the ideas of the other. I’m generalizing, but the sentiment goes something like this: The data-driven advocates see the creativity-first crowd as dinosaurs who are just grumpy the industry has left them behind. And those “dinosaurs” meanwhile claim the data-driven marketers are killing advertising, settling for predictable, mediocre results when they should be swinging for the fences.

Rhyme + Reason is a response to this polarization. I believe there are powerful roles for both art and science in marketing. It’s professional malpractice not to understand how both disciplines can be deployed to solve business challenges. Art and science. Magic and logic. Rhyme and reason. See?

Yes, I see. Very clever.
Thank you.

Sounds like you actually do have a founding belief.
I do now. The perspective was less well-formed in my mind when I decided to start my own agency. The frustration with increasing polarization was more like a background irritant six months ago.
This is an example of how creative solutions don’t always arise from a logical process. In this case, it was the choice of name that helped crystalize the perspective rather than the other way around. Once I got attached to the name Rhyme + Reason, I spent more time reading the works of those advocating either a deeper dive into data-driven approaches or a return to the glory days of creative alchemy. And that’s where I saw just how few experts would acknowledge the limitations of their preferred approach or the strengths of the approaches they were seeking to discredit. Understandable if you want to sell books, I suppose. But if those people lead agencies, are their clients getting reliable, unbiased counsel?

That’s a rhetorical question, isn’t it?
Yes, it is.

What are your aspirations for Rhyme + Reason? Is this a virtual agency? Are you building a team? If so, what size would you like to be?
I want to build a team. The team dynamic is one of the aspects of agency life I enjoy most and I’m motivated to reestablish that. I have fond memories of the dynamic in 12-15 person agencies so that’s where I’m aiming initially. Longer term, I’d say 30 people is my limit. If Rhyme + Reason can grow beyond 30 people, that’s great but somebody else will need to lead the way at that point.

What about clients?
Yes, we’ll need some of those.

Sigh. Ok. What kind of clients are you targeting?
We’ll build off my experience, much of which has involved selling this region—Nova Scotia in particular. My experience includes tourism marketing, place branding, business attraction, recruitment, and the marketing of products like Nova Scotia wines. I’ve learned a lot about what Nova Scotia has to offer and how audiences see our province. I’d like to work with brands and organizations for whom Nova Scotia’s brand is—or should be—a significant part of what they stand for.

Does that mean you’re only targeting local clients?
No, we’ll look beyond Atlantic Canada once the agency has a more established track record. I have some thoughts on how to do that, but I don’t love the idea of revealing my strategy for all to judge.

You think anybody is still reading this?
I guess we’ll never know.