Telus is putting its sponsorship of the Luminato arts festival on wheels.
The telco will be promoting its involvement with the festival with a unique media execution involving 12 branded EcoCabs, meant to ferry festival-goers around from location to location. The activation was created with GTA-based EcoCabs, a fleet of pedal-powered taxis owned by Toronto’s Go Mobile Media. The media buy was handled by GMR in Toronto.
The cabs will be wrapped in Telus branding and piloted by drivers who double as brand ambassadors. Sample iPhones will be mounted in each cab for riders to try. Each phone will feature the Luminato iPhone app, which riders can browse in the cab. Riders will also be encouraged to take photos while they are on their ride, and submit them to Telus to be featured in a special photo installation that will be unveiled at the end of the festival.
The Telus activation coincides with the summer launch of the EcoCab fleet, and the newly redesigned vehicle bodies the cabs will sport this season. Although the cabs are lighter and more aerodynamic, there’s actually a bit more room for branding, Go Mobile Media president Will Kozma tells MiC, explaining that the bike is about a foot taller, and half a foot wider. The new look was designed not only to make the cab easier to operate, Kozma explains, but to show the pedals more clearly as well, so that people understand they are in an environmentally friendly, pedal-powered vehicle.
EcoCab will operate about 30 cabs in the city this summer, Kozma says, and each branded vehicle is estimated to reach the eyeballs of about 80,000 people on an average summer day. In general, a cab will do about 70 rides per shift, and carry between 150 to 200 riders per day, per bike.
Kozma stresses that although the Lipton campaign that launched with the cabs in 2008 strongly associated EcoCabs with free tea, the mediaco is open to multiple sponsors for its fleet, with packages that include anything from four to all 30 cabs. And thanks to the emissions-free operation, he says, the buy is ideal for companies looking to manifest their CSR efforts.
