It was a sunny, hot day in Toronto when MiC stumbled across the most divine of OOH: a billboard pointing us, literally, to all the nearby places serving frosty cold Carlsberg beer.

Its cleverness stopped us in our tracks, and inspired a moment of consideration: the Bier Markt did sound like a pleasant place to enjoy a beverage on a long-weekend afternoon.

The billboard features the tagline ‘Probably worth a detour’ and as you can see in the photo, features an outward-facing street-sign post pointing viewers to neighbourhood pub Jason George, tourist destination Bier Markt, restaurant Kultura and the local LCBO.

MiC followed up on the weekend find with a phone call to the brand and learned it was part of a Toronto-based OOH campaign created by Espresso Media of Toronto, with media buying by Carlsberg and planning handled in tandem with Astral and Titan. Similar billboard executions are up in other neighbourhoods around the city, such as Queen West, Little Italy and the financial district (all with geo-targeted creative), on transit shelters and in a ‘walking billboard’ execution handled by Velvet Media of Toronto.

One of Carlsberg’s goals in Canada is to really push retail and partner sales, so the creative was designed to do so in a hyper-local way, Russ Morgan, group account director and Jacquelyn Cyr, CEO, Espresso Media, explained to MiC.

‘Instead of one generic tagline across the entire buy, we thought, why don’t we geo-target it and have messaging that really resonates in the smaller communities of Toronto,’ Morgan explains. ‘There are about six or seven different variations of the creative, and we’re really excited about the campaign.’

The campaign started early last week with an ad buy in the ‘Best Patio’ edition of Toronto’s Now Magazine. It will continue on, with more elements added, throughout the summer.