It’s not every day you pass a giant interactive vodka bottle as you make your way to work, but this month passersby in Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto will experience exactly that as the latest installment in Absolut’s ongoing ‘In an Absolut World’ campaign.
The large, street-level installations, launched this week, feature motion-sensor pads for people to step on, which then activate live video streaming to Absolut.ca. Visitors to the website can see the videos in real time, manipulate them with different templates or send the street-level user a scripted message. The person on the street can then retrieve their video from the site or text Absolut to request it using a short code.
The installations are part of a larger national campaign, rolling out in phases through November until the first week of December, developed in tandem by Toronto-based agencies Carat Canada (media, strategy), Isobar (digital) and Titan (bottle sculptures). (Absolut’s AOR is TBWAToronto.) The media buy includes pre-movie cinema ads, print placement in Famous magazine, an online media buy, large-scale night-time projections onto buildings in six Canadian cities markets, a billboard in Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto and in-bar promotions. The campaign also includes a social media strategy.
The campaign is designed to reach the 22- to 29-year-old demographic at virtually every touchpoint they might experience in an evening, Kelly Kretz, senior brand manager, Corby Distilleries, tells MiC.
‘We wanted quality of impressions, not necessarily quantity of impressions. Obviously with TV, you are guaranteed with a certain number of GRPs [gross ratings points] but with our target demo, we felt this plan was going to reach them more directly and several times,’ she explains. ‘If you think about it, a consumer could potentially go to the theatre [and] get hit a few times with our message, walk outside, see a night projection, see a billboard, see the bottle structure and then go into a bar and see mirror advertisements.’
