It’s our moment in the spotlight. And we didn’t even see it coming.

Today, Acart is front page news in the print edition of The Globe and Mail (as well as being featured online).

It turns out we are the winningest agency in Canada when it comes to Government of Canada public ad campaigns.

Surprised?

Acart Communications is probably not what you would expect an ad agency to be like. It’s not a den of conflicting egos, divas and iniquity. We are a modest team of seasoned professionals who work hard and play fair.

In fact, our agency looks a lot like Canada. We are a bilingual, multicultural group from a wide variety of beliefs and backgrounds. We work together to help our clients give people information they can use.

It’s ironic that we are suddenly “known” by the mainstream media for being “unknown”. Clients in our specialized public, private and not-for-profit sectors already know us, as does the advertising social media community. It’s just that we don’t care as much about seeking awards and the envy of our advertising peers. What motivates us is doing work that really matters — with empathy, passion and meaningful results.

For example, in the public sector, our last elder abuse awareness campaign for HRSDC scored some of the highest social marketing recall results ever measured for a federal government campaign. A couple of years ago, we worked day and night with PHAC to keep people updated on the progress of H1N1, and how to protect themselves. And we communicate a lot of government programs that can help people help themselves.

The result of this commitment, over the past few years, has been high scores on some of our responses to government RFPs in the new era of bureaucratic, transparent and objective agency selection.

The process uses a grid to score agency proposals on objective criteria like experience and qualifications of staff, understanding of the requirements, appropriateness of the creative and media strategy, and the results of past relevant campaigns. Because we have done some solid creative and media planning that meets the stated objectives, we have our fair share of wins.

The moral of the story is that hard work and focus lead to success. But you knew that already, didn’t you? You’re probably the same way.