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ZGM Awarded Alberta One-Call Rebrand
Last month, Alberta One-Call (AOC) awarded ZGM Modern Marketing Partners with a contract to rebrand its 37-year-old damage prevention notification service – and it’s a tall order! AOC isn’t just rebranding, it is combining services with the former Alberta Common Ground Alliance and the Joint Utility Safety Team.
“This is a unique marriage,” said Rob Fairhead, chief strategy officer with ZGM. “ZGM was selected to rebrand AOC almost 10 years ago, and we also created the brand for the Joint Utility Safety Team in 2007. Our clients and we were really happy with the results of those efforts, and now we get to challenge our own work. It isn’t often we get the opportunity to unify brands that we previously helped to create.”
“We recognize that each of these organizations have equity in their brands,” continued Fairhead “but it is perhaps more so in their respective calls-to-action, and that’s the big challenge – bridging awareness to, and engagement with, the new organization.”
“It isn’t just a fresh coat of paint, which was basically what we did nine years ago,” says AOC president, Mike Sullivan, “and AOC will still be providing industry-leading ClickBeforeYouDig services but going forward, it’s going to be so much more.”
The ABCGA’s roots begin roughly 25 years ago as the Alberta Utility Location Coordination Council, which then became the Alberta Damage Prevention Committee and eventually, the Alberta Common Ground Alliance. The ABCGA’s greatest strength was its working committees – best practices, damage reporting, education and awareness and training standards (the latter a national leader) – and those committees continue today under the influence of AOC. “The committees are autonomous,” noted AOC operations director, Sher Kirk, “but they are also part of the AOC structure. AOC provides the framework and support for committee functions and in turn, they conform with AOC operations and that means being ISO 9001 compliant.”
The JUST’s Where’s the Line? campaign objectives are more operational in nature than the ABCGA and for all intents and purposes, AOC and JUST will appear to operate independently until later this summer when rebranding is completed. “There’s a lot to do once the new brand is finalized,” added Sullivan. “We have to retool our website, update documentation, print new business cards, re-wrap our DigSafe Ambassador vehicles, record new radio spots – and all of that has to be ready for mid-summer when we enter the second phase of our advertising campaign.”
AOC is also introducing a new component to Where’s the Line? operations. Moving forward, overhead powerline data will be captured in AOC’s map base and those members will be notified when anyone is working nearby. “We’re developing notification details now,” said Kirk. “On the surface, it might appear simple but there’s a lot of decision-making that needs to happen before we can rollout this new service.”