Kruger Products has had its family of CPG brands, particularly Cashmere and Sponge Towels, activating at the Rogers Cup for years now.

From signage to family-friendly experiential activations to neat-freak mascot Spongie roaming around the venue for clean-ups on the go, Kruger CMO Nancy Marcus says the “family-friendly” nature of the event has helped lend itself to creative activations.

“The event has always given us a lot of flexibility to pull all of our programs together under one umbrella and activate creatively,” she tells MiC.

But this year, its washroom tissue brand Cashmere is providing a new activation and sprucing things up in a new area of the tennis tournament – in the washrooms.

In Toronto, Marcus says, several washrooms have been designated to be “a little bit more luxurious than others.” The brand will be decorating the washrooms to feel cozier and more sociable, and the specialty Cashmere product will be featured throughout.

It’s in addition to the brand’s long-running Ladies Day, which presents and pays tribute to various female athletes. With an audience of 300 to 400 sports fans, Marcus says it’s been a dependable way to communicate Cashmere’s brand positioning. The day will also usually bring in an inspiring figure, such as a breast cancer survivor, to further its cause marketing initiatives.

“We’ve been involved with this whole sponsorship since we began the brand transition 16 years ago, when we transitioned from Cottonelle to Cashmere. We wanted to communicate leading-edge women, wearing white, in an atmosphere that was competitive, high-profile. We thought the demographics matched perfectly with the brand at the time, so our current positioning is that we’re proud to bring a touch of softness to the court.”

And, this year, softness to the bathrooms. Marcus says it’s an opportunity to add more one-to-one marketing, in contrast to the mass play of the Ladies Day sponsorship.

The overall sponsorship and media plan was conceived by Wavemaker. In addition, a broader paid media campaign will run concurrently in the Greater Toronto and Greater Vancouver Areas, with Cantonese and Mandarin commercials to reach Chinese-Canadian audiences. The multicultural component of the campaign was done through agency Ethnicity.