Financial services company Desjardins Group has chosen Montreal-based integrated agency Bleublancrouge as its Canadian media and creative agency of record.

The appointment was made following a months-long request for proposals process, which was first announced in July. The move ends relationships with previous creative AOR Lg2 and media AOR Touche! after 15 and three years, respectively.

According to Stéphane Morency, VP of strategy, marketing and personal services at Desjardins, approximately twenty agencies took part in the review, including Lg2 and Touche!

Bleublancrouge, typically known for its work on the creative side, will handle media through agencies that are part of the Humanise Collective, a collection of seven agencies launched in October to collaborate on client work. In addition to Bleublancrouge, the collective includes data consultancy Glassroom, digital and tech agency U92 and events and experiential agency Youville Haussmann Park. It also has a strategic relationship with Montreal based digital media agency Dialekta, which offers services in programmatic, search and display.

Morency says Bleublancrouge will be responsible for seeing the financial organization through a customer-focused marketing transformation, something he says supports its mission to “enrich the lives of people.”

“We think there are a lot of things we can do to differentiate…from others because our purpose is not to make money, as we are a cooperative,” he says, adding that Bleublancrouge is in a position to support that transformation because “they have the energy, the vision and the tools to help align both the creative and the media.”

In terms of creative, Morency says Bleublancrouge is both passionate and equipped from a methodology point of view, which he says allows them to link strategy to creative. On the media side, he says the agency’s strength in optimization “compensates for their size, because they’re not a worldwide group.”

Morency calls it a “new type of partnership” where the agency accepts their role as part of an ecosystem led from inside, as Desjardins is in the process of building an internal team to lead data-based initiatives, such as optimization, targeting and personalization.

“I think the name of the game as we are internalizing a lot of this, is to have partners that are almost like consultants and are helping us get better,” he notes. “We felt that they were in a good position to support the team that we’re building internally in terms of data-based optimization.”

Between its banking, wealth management, life insurance and wealth management lines of business, Morency says the company has a great deal of data and will use it more effectively to “enrich the lives” of its customers. He adds that the company wants to use the data to be more proactive in advising its customers.