Overweight men don’t usually feel the need to lose weight until the extra poundage becomes a health issue, so Herbal Magic, a Toronto-based weight loss program, can’t speak to this new target demo in the same way they do to women.

‘Men and women have different triggers that need to be activated before they decided to make the decision to get to a healthy weight,’ Caroline Kolompar, VP of marketing, Herbal Magic, tells MiC, adding that the majority of their current clients are women.

To help reach this new target, the brand is partnering with eight Canadian Football League (CFL) alumni for an online-only sponsorship that has players like Gerry Dattilio (Calgary Stampeders) and Ralph Scholz (Hamilton Tiger-Cats) battling it out online at WeightLossCup.ca. The players get weekly points for achieving a goal to either lose a certain number of pounds or keep them off, but they get bonus points if they achieve 10% of the weekly fan vote. The program will be advertised exclusively on CFL.ca, but Kolompar also hopes the site will gain traffic through WOM.

The campaign and program has a core age target of 25- to 60-year-old males, and it was developed in-house between Herbal Magic and CFL.

‘We felt like the online audience of CFL just meshed 100% with who we were going after,’ Kolompar says. ‘We do think it’s a large business opportunity.’