It’s Monday, Jan. 8 – Cossette Communication Group’s official calendar date for the ‘takedown’ of the massive holiday domination of Bell Mobility’s Frank and Gordon campaign.
The teaser campaign began in early November with mysterious elegantly-wrapped presents hitting billboards, transit stops, buses, malls, stairways, floors – you name it, saturating Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver. By mid-November, the campaign entered its unwrapping phase, and Frank and Gordon were upon us, pushing an array of Bell Mobility products, right through the holiday season. In full swing, the characters confronted us wherever we went – on TV, radio, website banners, videos tied to broadband buys. From the third week of November to beyond New Year’s Eve, consumers were hit with more than 20 executions, each applied in various formats.
In a novel twist, they even put phones behind the posters. In one wall poster execution, used at Toronto’s Yonge-Bloor subway station, a beaver invited transit riders to plug their earphones into the hole (marked by a set of rings, like a bulls-eye) and hear his favourite song. Anybody who accepted the offer was treated to Frank and Gordon singing Winter Wonderland. This may seem like a very measurable idea. Not so. Montreal-based Cossette Communications Marketing Bell Mobility lead Nicolas Van Erum tells MiC the technology didn’t exactly allow for counting the number of plugged-in headsets.
‘Obviously, the idea was to be highly interactive with consumers and play around with the music feature and the download feature on the phones,’ he explains. ‘It’s a nice little gift to the consumers. Behind the board, what you don’t see is that it’s actually a cell phone there, and the cell phone is replaced on a daily basis so the batteries can be recharged.’
While no results are currently being released, Van Erum says ‘It’s definitely the largest operation that Bell has undertaken, and it’s definitely the largest OOH campaign in the year. Overall everybody’s very happy with the campaign and very satisfied with the media, locations and tactics that were used.’
