The in-house creative team at Canwest is thinking ‘outside the box and into the forest’ in a four-week marketing campaign for History Television’s new reality series Ax Men. The show follows four Oregon logging companies dealing with the dangers of the job – like snapped cables and runaway logs – in a business where small mistakes can have huge consequences. Targeting males 25 to 54, it’s part of the network’s strategy to be more engaging.
With the message ‘The Ultimate Job Hazard Is the Job,’ the multimedia effort kicked off this week with a 3D superboard featuring a 22-foot-tall tree and a life-size replica of an Ax Man, strategically placed in Toronto’s Beaches area. Targeting handymen in Toronto and Vancouver, billboards can also be found near Home Depot and Canadian Tire stores.
Also included are print ads in the Toronto Star, the free daily Metro and The Beer Store’s Chill magazine. During the fall sports season, resto-board advertising is targeting sports bar franchises such as Boston Pizza and Philthy McNasty, which has Ax Men artwork fitted with motion detectors to replicate the sounds of a chainsaw.
Ax Men‘s US premiere last March on History Channel US experienced a viewership of 1.7 million adults 25 to 54 and 1.6 million adults 18 to 49, making it the top series on cable for the evening in those demos and the network’s second-highest-rated program ever.
The show airs Tuesdays at 9 pm ET/PT, and the ad opportunities include sponsor tags on promotion spots.
