Sympatico.ca hosted a yoga class during rush hour in the middle of Toronto’s Union Station Thursday morning, and the web portal is taking its limber participants to Montreal’s Central Station next week to repeat the stunt.
Four women in yoga pants and Sympatico.ca t-shirts followed a teacher through various stretches as spokespeople handed out branded water bottles to passersby and talked up web portal’s branded channels. For this execution, the focus was the Best Health brand, which focuses on health and lifestyle content for women.
Approximately 240,000 people pass through Union Station every day and 65% of the transit system’s users are women, Patrick Larouche, director of marketing and communications, Sympatico.ca, tells MiC.
‘It totally aligned with the product we have,’ he says. ‘And on top of that, the execution of yoga is conflicting so much with rush hour in the morning and the evening that it’s really standing out.’
This is part of a larger four-month campaign to promote the portal’s seven main brands – InMusic, InMovies, Your Money, Best Health (a partnership with Reader’s Digest), Autos, Magic Santa (to be launched near Christmas) and the homepage.
The campaign’s media plan was developed by Cossette, Bell’s previous media agency of record (the telco recently named Media Experts as its MAOR). Creative was done by Vancouver-based Rethink, and the experiential placements are being handled by Montreal-based Speed.
The yoga stunt follows up another one that was focusing attention on the web portal’s Autos brand. That execution had a branded smoking car on the back of a flatbed tow truck off to the side of a busy thoroughfare.
Larouche says a third stunt will be coming to Toronto and Montreal later this month. To promote the Your Money brand, the company is placing a seven-foot-tall see-through box full of change in the street.
As the yoga moves east to Montreal, a duplicate of OOH that has been up in Montreal is coming to Toronto. The 3D billboard features a real-life car smashed through the ad, promoting the Autos brand.
