If you live in Toronto, Vancouver or Calgary, you’ll be hard-pressed to miss what’s new on Showcase this fall, thanks to a large-scale multimedia campaign launched Monday.
Targeting adults 25 to 54, the multimedia strategy promotes new Showcase series’ Burn Notice, the Canadian drama Lost Girl, and the sixth season of Weeds using on-air promos, OOH, radio, print, cinema, IPGs and online with a focus on large-scale (and first-time) executions. All media and creative were handled internally by Canwest.
Toronto’s suburban commuters will get an eyeful of Burn Notice with two Go Train exterior wraps promoting the show, complemented with internal posters on the trains and external posters at station entrances.
The show will also be promoted to urban commuters as part of a two-station subway domination at St. George and Union stations in Toronto. The dominations include all the usual media – wall and floor decals, platform posters and in-car posters – as well as being the first advertiser to take advantage of new exterior subway-car posters. There are six 26×36 ad units per side on the subway cars, and Canwest has creative on eight cars.
‘We’re always looking for new opportunities and when the media team brought this to our attention, we thought, wow, what a great opportunity to make [the transit campaign] feel bigger,’ Sherida German, director, marketing strategy, Canwest Dramatic Channels, tells MiC.
The three premiere Showcase shows are all advertised, and the dominations also include promotion of other Canwest shows. In Vancouver, the transit media buy includes Skytrain stations and West Coast Express commuter trains.
Canwest is continuing the big-media theme with a cinema media plan that includes 60-second trailers that will run in the last spots before the film starts. The media plan also includes online display on major portal websites and entertainment-focused websites, radio promoting Burn Notice and Lost Girl, print (a focus in Calgary where the plan does not include transit), IPGs and on-air spots, and across Canwest speciality and Global.
The goal behind the media plan was to leverage the impact of the creative against the media it was placed in, German says.
‘Fall’s a really busy time for all broadcasters and a lot of other advertisers, so when you have really beautiful, slick, sophisticated creative, you just really want to showcase it in as many places as you can.’
