Loblaw Companies Limited
Data science that’s not killing democracy
Focus:
Employer Brand Transformation & Value Strategy Development
Key Elements:
Decision-Dynamics Research, Creative Direction, Content Strategy, UX Design, Career Site Reinvention, Storytelling.
The Challenge
In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, data scientists had a perception problem, and Loblaw had a recruiting problem. The largest supermarket operator in Canada was building out a serious data science practice, the kind of operation that drives product selection, pricing, placement, demand forecasting, and supply chain at scale across thousands of locations. But they were trying to hire from a talent pool that had just watched their profession become synonymous with election manipulation, surveillance capitalism, and the slow erosion of democratic institutions.
Loblaw needed data scientists. Data scientists needed a reason to believe their work could still mean something.
Finding the Insight
The cultural moment was loud. Data science had an image crisis playing out in real time, and the people who did the work were feeling it. A running joke in the community held that the majority of a data scientist's day was spent looking for a different data science job. Whether or not that was literally true, it was emotionally true, and that's what mattered. The audience was restless, skeptical, and had a sharp enough sense of humor to appreciate being called out directly.
Loblaw's own brand gave us permission to go there. Their consumer marketing had been irreverent, confident, a little cheeky. The employer brand campaign didn't need to borrow equity from somewhere else. It just needed to use what was already there.
The Strategy
Rather than building a standalone microbrand for the data science recruiting effort, the recommendation was to run a brand-adjacent campaign that drew directly from Loblaw's existing personality. The positioning reframed the work with deliberate wit: data science in service of figuring out what 26 million Canadians want for dinner, not manipulating an election. The copy leaned into the contrast without apology. "Data science jobs that are not killing democracy." "Data science to predict dinner, not scandal." Bright pink. Blunt headlines. A career site that felt nothing like a corporate recruiting page.
The creative system included display advertising, a purpose-built landing page, and mobile executions built to intercept the audience where they actually spent time, including the corners of the internet where that restless, job-searching data scientist was already hanging out.
What We Built
The engagement was concepting and campaign development: the strategic platform, creative direction, copy, and executions across display, career site, and mobile. The work was ready to run.
The Result
Legal killed it. Which, in its own way, says everything. A campaign bold enough to make a legal team nervous is a campaign that was actually saying something. Loblaw's client team loved the work, and the creative platform demonstrated exactly what happens when a brand is confident enough to speak to a skeptical audience in its own language. Sometimes the best proof that an idea worked is that someone decided it worked too well.