What value do Chartered Professional Accountants add to the business world? CPA, the industry’s membership-based body, has launched a national campaign that aims to answer that question with the tagline: “the right fit for business.”
The $6.5 million campaign, which launched this week and will run through the end of March 2016, is the body’s third national campaign and represents at $1.5 million boost over 2013’s. It’s part of an effort to build awareness of the industry’s relatively new professional designation under which chartered accountants, certified general accountants and certified management accountants fall under the same title.
Jungle Media handled the media buy and Montreal-based Resevoir developed the creative for the campaign.
This was the first time that Jungle Media worked with CPA on media. In developing the right media mix, the CPA’s third campaign shifted the focus of the media buy from its initial awareness campaign on national TV, to localized OOH and now to a highly targeted combination of both.
The problem with the previous media plan, says Heather Whyte, the organization’s VP of strategic communications, branding and public affairs, was that many Canadian businesses are not in the downtown or financial districts. “We weren’t reaching them because some of them are smaller and are not always in the business areas. We had to expand the campaign to reach rural and industrial areas where a lot of businesses are.”
Which is why year three of the campaign sees a heavier investment on TV spend as well as OOH advertising in high-traffic specialty areas like Pearson Airport, Billy Bishop in Toronto and on the Gardiner Expressway. The campaign is also visible in airports across the country, in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa, Winnipeg and Halifax. In addition, there are bus shelter take-overs planned.
The TV commercial will air on business specialty channels beginning Sept. 21, with radio commercials also airing on Tout Le Monde en parle on Radio Canada.
A new addition to the media mix is a sponsorship partnership with two TV programs on CBC, Dragons’ Den and The National where CPA will be integrated into the program. A CPA member will prep and evaluate a participant’s pitch as a segment integrated into the broadcast.
Whyte says, “The focus was on showing the benefits of CPAs and what they bring to business, to social, economic, public life. We used a whole bunch of different words to say we bring the tools to help grow a business, to make it work better.” The campaign also tries to shake off the image of chartered accountants as dry, tight-lipped and boring people with messaging like “Pros do crunching for fun” and “Pros make both dollars and sense.”
The campaign’s messaging is built around the idea that a CPA has the ability to see the big picture for a business and help with strategy, finance and vision-building for businesses of all sizes. To this end Resevoir developed a puzzle graphic in which each piece – finance, management, innovation, strategy, for example – come together to build the big picture.
