To celebrate their 100th season, the NFL wanted to do something special in Canada. Because it may be an American game, but there are millions of NFL fans north of the border.
Our solution: the Fantennial Challenge. Starting with three kickoff events in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, we launched a season-long contest to identify the 32 biggest superfans in Canada (one for each NFL team). The Challenge lived on a website and on the league’s social channels.
Every week you could earn points by responding to a new email challenge, like pre-game speeches, touchdown dances or carving your team’s logo into a pumpkin for Halloween. We asked Canadian fans to step up and thousands of them delivered, posting their entries on Instagram and Twitter. The response we got was huge, heartwarming and often hilarious.
By season’s end we had our 32 superfans and one grand prize winner (and he had two tickets to the Super Bowl in Miami). We also had some amazing UGC, which we showcased in a campaign to get more Canadians watching the playoffs. Our home-grown creative was an Instagram hit, out-performing NFL commercials from south of the border.
I was lucky to work on almost every FCA brand, but there’s nothing quite like Jeep. There are very few brands that have such an authentic heritage and such a passionate consumer following. It allows you to go a bit further with your creative ideas, be more adventurous, have more fun. From TV spots to social media to print to radio to auto show displays, we did it all.
Kinder Canada was fighting a battle for recognition with its Bueno brand. To raise awareness and sales volume, they came to us in search of a social strategy. We got to work creating original content aimed at the Bueno target audience: young, professional women who were active on social media.
We mixed product photo shoots with nimble video work to produce relevant, appetizing posts. Almost two years later, Kinder Bueno has built a loyal Instagram following with a hunger to drive increased sales in Canada.
It's not every day you can change the conversation around a brand.
PayPal had an awareness problem. Everyone knew you could use PayPal to send money to a friend or buy stuff on eBay. But fewer consumers knew that you could use PayPal to shop on the go with Starbucks, Uber, The Home Depot, Cineplex and other big brands that people use every day.
We came up with an online strategy that appealed to our urban, video-hungry target. Instead of telling people how easy it is to use PayPal, we’d show them, focusing on how two competitive friends used their phones in the real world. Even in the bathroom.
The results were beyond expectations: 10 million total video views, with 4 million video completes. A one-day YouTube masthead buy yielded 19 million impressions, with an impressive 56% VCR (video complete rate). Our 15 second pre-roll videos had an 84% VCR, vs. industry benchmark of 12%. Overall, VCR was 3X the industry average.
Our client's head of Global Marketing called it “Probably the best video I have ever seen at PayPal.”
It was such a success that we did a sequel. Our overly competitive pals were back, but now they weren't one-upping each other out of pride. This time, they were doing it for love.
The new romantic thread gave us license to play with classic rom-com tropes, and we actually topped our numbers from the previous year.
Sometimes you just get to have fun, by boldly going where no one has gone before.
Canada Post was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the original Star Trek series by releasing limited edition stamps and collectibles. They wanted to generate buzz. They wanted a campaign. And they wanted something special to take to fan conventions, where the real Trekkers would be found.
The insight was a perfect match. Who knows more about transporting than Canada Post? Our campaign led Star Trek fans to an experience that -- shockingly -- no one had delivered before: Seeing yourself get transported from the deck of the starship Enterprise to a planet's surface. We had a blast conceiving the idea and making it come to life. Canada Post sold a galaxy's worth of collectibles. And we transported thousands of fans, many of them from strange new worlds...
We had the unique opportunity to do work for the Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital. Their 'Change for Kids' campaign was looking for a new direction, one that would put their amazing kids front and centre.
We came to see these children (and their parents) as heroes who were overcoming obstacles every single day. This led to a new tagline: Crush Barriers. We didn't want you to feel sorry for these kids. We wanted you to celebrate them with us, and join in their fight to live healthy, fulfilled lives.
With the help of media & corporate sponsors, we featured our heroes on TV, radio, print and online through banners and a revamped kidsforchange.ca website. Our immensely helpful clients were thrilled with result. Even more importantly, we got a big thumbs up from our stars and their families.
Our radio spot, which ran for over a month in the GTA, featured the voice of award-winning actress Sheila McCarthy. Her gracious and enthusiastic participation truly put the cherry on top of the campaign.
Over a quarter of a million small businesses use PayPal to accept online payments in Canada. That was a story worth telling — especially to the thousands of small business owners who weren’t using PayPal yet.
First we identified intriguing, diverse businesses who had incorporated PayPal into their payment solutions. Everyone we talked to had a unique story to tell. We picked the best ones and filmed them at work, showcasing how their passion had become their profession — and how PayPal integrated into their business.
There was real power in showing other Canadian entrepreneurs how easy and effective PayPal could be. The program was such a hit that we filmed new, original content for five years in a row.
BMO surveyed their employees to test how much they knew about money. Surprise! It turned out that bank employees had the same knowledge gaps in budgeting, financial planning, debt and borrowing as the general public. It was time to boost their financial literacy so they could serve their customers better.
BMO came to us for an educational platform that would inspire changes in their employees’ behaviour. The idea for Let’s Start was born.
We built a digital ecosystem that included a website and a robust email program to keep employees engaged and motivated. We made it easy to use, simple to understand, always friendly and with rewards at every step of the way. Yes, financial literacy can actually be fun.
We caught our audience’s interest right away. People kept returning to the site, while the email open and click-through rates surpassed industry benchmarks. This internal success even spurred ongoing plans to open up Let's Start to BMO's customers.
In an increasingly digital world, marketers are using the mail less and less to reach their customers. But Direct Mail is still a highly effective way to get your brand in a customer’s hand.
But how could Canada Post remind marketers that their most efficient advertising medium was the mail? The challenge -- and the fun -- was to make it happen by combining the traditional and the new: Direct + Digital.
We made it possible by mailing the 'Picture Yourself in Cannes' contest to Canada's top advertisers & marketers. To enter, you had to download our iPhone app, then take a picture of yourself against a Cannes backdrop while holding one or more coasters. The app magically transformed each coaster into a Cannes Gold Lion, so our entrants could literally picture themselves winning the prestigious award in the sun-drenched south of France.
At the same time, we presented marketers with some entertaining, salient facts about the efficacy of Direct Mail. Check out the video for the results.
Blue Light was losing sales and market share to Bud Light and Miller Light in the crucial summer selling season.
The solution: eBay for beer.
Had we ever built a site like this on desktop or mobile? Nope. Nevertheless, we launched an interactive summer loyalty program to increase brand awareness, drive sales and give beer drinkers a reason to keep coming back. For consumers, the rules were simple:
1. Buy Blue Light.
2. Collect Auction points.
3. Bid on awesome stuff.
The results? We exceeded our consumer target by over 2,000 members. The Auction website had almost 200,000 visits, with return rates of 71% on desktop and 75% on mobile. Most important: an average sales increase of 7.8% -- and this was achieved in a down category.
Having a good story to tell makes everything easier. In this case, BMO InvestorLine wanted to trumpet their legitimate credentials as a customer-friendly, award-winning service for investors. Our campaign had two goals: Raise awareness and drive sign-ups.
For the latter objective, we decided to go a little romantic, painting a picture of a smart professional woman who feels neglected by her online discount brokerage. A bit of a thematic stretch? Perhaps. But the video performed so well that BMO ran it again the next year.
The task: Create awareness of the new LG's flagship smartphone in a crowded mobile marketplace, with a fraction of the budget used by competitors like Apple or Samsung.
We launched a two-pronged campaign, jointly targeted at techies and entertainment seekers. On the launch website, users could 'Learn' by checking out the all the specs... or they could 'Play' by having the features explained to them by our four experts: An 80s rocker, a whiz kid, a Latin lover and a beauty pageant queen (sadly, an evil genius loosely based on Dr. Evil and James Bond nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld was quashed by our client's legal department).
We had way too much fun on this campaign.
The long-awaited return of Fiat 500 to North American shores was a major event. This stylish little number had decades of heritage behind it, with a passionate niche audience hungrily awaiting the arrival of the first models.
Our mandate was to celebrate the distinctive design of the Cinquecento on social media. This gave us an enjoyable palette to use, and sparked an activation idea: Take the new car to the aesthetic experts at OCAD and the George Brown School of Design to see what they would say. The verdict was unanimous: This peppy vehicle had plenty of pizzazz.
More and more home improvers go to YouTube to research how-to ideas before they even think about going to the store. We took advantage of this behaviour by targeting specific videos to users who were searching related projects.
The videos themselves used TV footage, in-store video, product stills and whatever else we had on hand to tell a compelling, 15 second story.
The results were so good that we opened the door to a significant new investment into online video from our client.
