Canadian web portal Sympatico.ca has spent the last several years building a portfolio of branded channels and is now setting out on a four-month campaign to promote them to the public.

The portal’s seven main brands – InMusic, InMovies, Your Money, Best Health (a partnership with Reader’s Digest), Autos, Magic Santa (to be launched near Christmas) and the homepage – will be advertised online, in print and through OOH.

The campaign media plan was developed by Cossette, Bell’s previous media agency of record (the telco recently named Media Experts as its MAOR). Creative was done by Vancouver-based Rethink, and the experiential placements, which will include guerrilla tactics, are being handled by Montreal-based Speed.

The media buy is specific for each of the sub-brands, with ads for InMusic (which has a target audience of young adults from 18 to 35) placed in subways in Toronto and Montreal and online at Last.fm, Vevo.com, MySpace, Muchmusic and MTV. There will also be national print and OOH in Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City and Windsor.

While Sympatico has been around for 15 years and Canadians know the name, people don’t actually know what it represents, Patrick Larouche, director of marketing and communications, tells MiC.

‘The awareness around Sympatico is extremely strong in Canada, but when it comes to our major properties…people are unaware of the brands, so we wanted to make sure that we’re communicating [that to] consumers,’ says Larouche.

The ads show a web address bar with URLs playing up the benefits of the sites while connecting them to the Sympatico brand. For example, an ad promoting the InMusic property shows an address bar that reads, ‘sympatico.ca/inmusic/playlists_you_will_actually_play.’

The homepage and channels together get nine million unique visitors per month, according to Sympatico.