Marketing agency H2 Accelerator opens Calgary office amid strong growth
The Calgary office is staffed by five people and ready to hire more as it builds its local client base
David Parker, Calgary Herald
From left, president Scott King and executive creative director Joe Hospodarec in the new Calgary office of marketing and creative agency H2 Accelerator.
Marketing and creative agency H2 Accelerator has enjoyed 25 years of trail-blazing success on Vancouver Island, and recently expanded its operation to Alberta with the opening of an office in Calgary. Based here, Scott King has been appointed president of H2 Accelerator and Joe Hospodarec as executive creative director.
From Victoria, H2 CEO Dan Dagg says the company has experienced unprecedented growth since 2021, tripling gross sales and expanding the team from 16 to 23 full-time staff. He has an interesting story to tell — he bought a one-man agency called Hothouse Marketing, steadily built it up, launched a separate digital company and a competitive studio, then merged them together into H2. But the success of the agency meant that it had pretty well saturated the Vancouver Island market with its large number of accounts.
They still include clients such as Coastal Community Credit Union that it has served for 20 years, Tourism Nanaimo, Oak Bay Marine Group, and Victoria-based Connect Hearing Services, which has grown into a national account. But, like many other companies, H2 suffered from buyouts of its clients by larger firms, and the client base became smaller.
Earlier in his career, Dagg was a junior partner at Copeland Communications, which was then B.C.’s fifth-largest agency. There, he hired Hospodarec, a much-lauded creative director who had moved from Calgary to Vancouver — while keeping his house in Calgary.
After H2 was awarded the Easymax and Heritage Park accounts in Calgary, it seemed the right thing to do to have people on the ground here, and Hospodarec was soon spending a lot of time back in Calgary and is now a permanent resident again. He had spent most of his working career here with agencies such as WAX, Parallel and Karo, earning international recognition for his work, including Communication Arts, The One Show Gold Pencil, Applied Arts and Marketing Magazine awards.
An award-winning digital marketer with more than 20 years of experience, King began his career on the technical side. After working with Trigger Communications and digital agency Rare Method, he spent 10 years at the Calgary head office of Critical Mass. A strategic planner, he spent a week each month with accounts in Chicago and San Antonio, while earning accolades, including the prestigious Jay Chiat Award for strategic work with UN Mine Action Services.
“Scott’s strategic heft and big ideas inspire our team and clients,” says Dagg. “Growing west with the right people in place feels like a natural evolution.”
Dagg credits much of his agency’s success to incorporating a hybrid work model — due in part to the agency’s response to the pandemic — as the driving force behind its creativity, connection and exceptional growth. “Hybrid works for us,” says Dagg. “We’ve unlocked a formula for modern work-life balance that’s transformed both our culture and results.” The two offices are working together as one seamless unit: every Wednesday all staff are in the office, daily they get together for a Zoom chat, and every three months Dagg flies everybody to Victoria for a working get-together.
The Calgary office is staffed by five people and ready to hire more as it builds its local client base.
“I’m thrilled to be leading the H2 in Alberta,” King says. “We’re building a team that’s passionate about both their work and lives outside of it. This energy sparks creative solutions and elevates careers.”
Among the newer members of its portfolio is Sophie Grace, a Calgary-based designer and manufacturer of comfortable and stylish workwear for women that sells its collection online across Canada and the U.S. It is also helping Spirit North, a not-for-profit connecting Indigenous youth to sport, play, the outdoors and land.
King expects business here to grow primarily out of the company’s experience in serving tourism, the financial services and agriculture.