With the smartphone market saturated with iPhone and Blackberry advertising, Taiwan-based cell phone maker HTC has been virtually unknown in North America. But the brand is hoping those days are over as it breaks out a countrywide media campaign to promote its latest phone, the Hero.
The campaign launched in Canada this week, and was unveiled to the media yesterday at an event in downtown Toronto. With the creative theme ‘Quietly Brilliant,’ developed by Los Angeles-based Deutsch, the campaign was devised to both increase brand awareness for HTC and launch the new phone in the ever-more-crowded smartphone market.
The media buy in Canada, handled by Toronto’s Media Experts, includes 60-second, 30-second and 15-second TV spots across both conventional and specialty networks. The creative for the 60- and 30-second spots focused on the brand’s positioning as extremely customer-focused, and the 15-second ads focus on the Hero phone and include Telus branding, as the mobile network is the only one to carry the phone in Canada.
The media buy also includes digital, kicking off Monday with a one-day site takeover of MSN.ca, a move that included all ad units on the homepage and generated nine million impressions during that time with a clickthrough rate of 0.11, HTC Canada marketing program manager Sarah Gratta told MiC. The digital strategy also includes banner buys on retail partner sites such as BestBuy.ca and FutureShop.ca, and an OOH buy in Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas Square.
‘We have very heavy awareness goals,’ Gratta explained. ‘We want to double our awareness before the end of the year, so TV is really important. We had a tiered approach between TV and digital and…we’re going to reach 95% of English Canada, 21 times each.’
