M2 wins Yorkdale account
Yorkdale Shopping Centre in Toronto has appointed Toronto-based M2 Universal its agency of record. The media division of MacLaren McCann, M2 will be responsible for all media planning and buying on behalf of the Centre. Yorkdale has over 200 stores and services and plans significant growth in this spring with the addition of 40 high-profile retailers.
Nancy Surphlis, VP group account director, is leading the team, which is already planning what’s up next for Yorkdale.
Media Calgary acquired by Rare Method
RareMethod Capital finalized its acquisition of media planning firm Media Calgary yesterday. RareMethod which, among its many services, provides interactive marketing consultancy, search engine and e-mail marketing, and online application development, will employ Media Calgary principal Nigel McEathron and his two employees. Media Calgary’s clients include Capital Alternatives, Canadian Pharmacies Direct, Green Garden Centre and Liquidation World.
BBM Top 20
For a list of the top 20 TV shows for the week of Jan. 10 to Jan. 16, according to BBM, click the links below:
http://www.mediaincanada.com/articles/mic/20050120/nat01102005.pdf
http://www.mediaincanada.com/articles/mic/20050120/ont01102005.pdf
http://www.mediaincanada.com/articles/mic/20050120/que01102005.pdf
http://www.mediaincanada.com/articles/mic/20050120/tor01102005.pdf
http://www.mediaincanada.com/articles/mic/20050120/van01102005.pdf
Hockey icon’s dad gets TV movie
Production began yesterday on Waking Up Wally: The Walter Gretzky Story. The CBC TV movie is based on the best-selling book by the father of hockey legend Wayne Gretzky and chronicles Gretzky senior’s fight to regain his memory and his life after suffering a brain aneurysm in 1991.
Tom McCamus (The Sweet Hereafter) stars in the two-hour film. CBC publicist Christian Hasse says it’s too early to determine an airdate but that if there’s hockey next year, the movie will probably be programmed around that.
Mitsou to helm Newsworld magazine show
Quebec celebrity Mitsou Gélinas has been signed to host Au Courant, a new English-language program on CBC Newsworld which will look at what’s making news in French Canada. Gélinas, best known in English Canada as a sex kitten singer for her hit single and video Bye Bye Mon Cowboy, has since been an actor, magazine editor, TV host and radio personality.
Au Courant plans to present viewers with people, stories and perspectives they won’t find elsewhere on English television. The show will air Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. beginning Feb. 5, repeating Sundays at noon.
Ed The Sock reviews epic movie classics
Ok, so maybe Dude, Where’s My Car and Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo aren’t exactly cinematic masterpieces, but that may work in Citytv’s favour when the network premiers Ed’s Nite In, Ed The Sock’s new interstitial programming accompanying Tuesday night movies. Beginning this Tuesday, the acerbic sock puppet and his cronies will provide viewers with their point of view regarding the contributions these films have made to the art of cinema, from the comfort of Ed’s apartment. As of now, Citytv has plans to run Ed’s Nite In for at least the next four weeks while Ed gets his proverbial feet wet. In the meantime, City will be developing advertising opportunities including lead sponsorship and product placement within Ed’s apartment.
Acclaimed Finkleman series returns
The Newsroom is back for a third season. The critically acclaimed Ken Finkleman comedy will air six new episodes, with the sixth an unexpected foray into animation. Season three will also see a return to a greater focus on comedy, after quite a dark season last year.
The show will air on CBC beginning Monday, Feb. 14 at 8:30 p.m. It was recently nominated for an International Emmy Award for Best Comedy.
Teletoon draws up four new series
Teletoon is unveiling four new animated series this March. Two of the shows, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends (six-to-nine demo) and Harry and His Bucketful of Dinosaurs (three-to-six demo) will join the network’s children’s programming schedule.
Harry and His Bucketful of Dinosaurs will air Monday to Friday at 9:30 a.m. (premiering March 28) while Foster’s will air at various times on Fridays and Saturdays (premiering March 11).
Teletoon will also air special March Break programming including G.I. Joe’s triumphant return to television on Saturday, March 19 at 10 a.m. with a CGI-animated movie, entitled G.I. Joe: Valor vs. Venom.
The other two new series, Bromwell High and The Venture Brothers, will join Teletoon’s popular evening block, The Detour. The block sees its largest audience with males 18-34 though, thanks to a cast of strong female characters in Bromwell, the network is expecting to see higher numbers with women. Bromwell will air at both 10:30 p.m. and 1 a.m. Monday to Friday after its March 7 premiere while Venture Brothers will air Sundays at 10:30 p.m. beginning March 13.
BBM Media Snapshot
Canadians with $500,000 or more in investments
Canada’s biggest investors are males 45+, heavy media consumers
-610,000 Canadians (2%) have investments worth $500,000 or more
-83% are age 45 or older and almost one-third (32%) are aged 65 or older
-They are more likely to be male (60%) than female (41%)
-They are 18 times more likely than average to have a personal yearly income of $150,000 or more
-33% are retired and another 23% have upper management or professional occupations
-19% never use an ATM machine and 37% never use a debit card for retail purchases
-Just under half (45%) have an Internet banking plan and 17% use Internet stock trading (2.6 times higher than the national average)
-The top four banks among this group are: TD Canada Trust (21% stating this is their principal bank), RBC (18%), Bank of Montreal (11%) and CIBC (11%)
-56% use a full-service broker (three times the national average) and 17% have changed the institution they use for investments in the past two years
-Almost all (95%) own their own home; 17% expect to move in the next two years
-They are over-represented in Ontario and B.C. (3% vs. 2% average) and under-represented in Quebec (1%) and Atlantic Canada (1%). The Prairie provinces have an average number of Canadians with $500,000 or more in investments.
-To reach Canadians with $500,000 or more in investments, the top four media by yesterday exposure are: radio (91%), TV (89%), daily paper (77%) and Internet (61%).
Source: BBM RTS Canada Fall ’03/Spring ’04
The preceding information is from BBM RTS, a syndicated consumer-media survey of over 55,000 Canadians, conducted twice a year by BBM Canada. For more information contact Craig Dorning of BBM Canada: cdorning@bbm.ca.
ComBase Market Focus: Ontario
Ontario adults are strong community newspaper readers:
– 77% – or 707,400 readers – report reading any community newspaper (weekday or weekend).
– 58% (535,000 readers) report reading any daily newspaper (weekday or weekend).
– 29% are exclusive community newspaper readers. This represents almost 266,000 Ontario adults who only read the community paper and not a daily.
– Exclusive Ontario community newspaper readers tend to be women between 25 and 49 years old.
When it comes to other media in Ontario:
– 25% of adults admit they didn’t listen to any radio yesterday;
– 11% report listening to non-commercial CBC stations; and
– 38% of adults report watching less than 9.5 hours of television in the past week. That’s less than an hour and a half a day.
Source: ComBase 2003-2004 Study
ComBase, the Community Newspaper Database, is a syndicated consumer-media survey of more than 400 Canadian markets that provides consistent and accurate, market-by-market information to assist in the buying and selling of community newspaper advertising space.
It is an initiative of the Canadian Community Newspaper Association and its nearly 700 members across the country. For more information, contact Kelly Levson, senior project manager, kellylevson@combase.ca.
http://www.combase.ca
TVA eyes sports, sitcoms for T1
Now that he’s got it, Serge Bellerose still isn’t sure what to do with Toronto 1. But that’s okay, he says, no rush. There won’t be any real changes at the struggling station until fall, which gives him and the other brass at Quebecor a bit of time to figure out what went wrong and how to set it right.
TVA and Sun Media, both arms of the Quebecor empire, bought the station from CHUM late last year and will spend the better part of 2005 running market research in the Ontario capital, he says, examining public perception of the station and its programming, which failed to attract significant viewers or advertisers after an ambitious launch in late 2003.
CIBC Stars in first-ever page-one ad
Sunday marked a first for CIBC, ZenithOptimedia and The Toronto Star. ZenithOptimedia managed to swing a deal to place the first ad on the front page of the Star in the 112-year history of Toronto’s largest circulation daily. Although Sunday’s ad focused on RRSP season, the page-one slot will be a long-term Sunday position, with ads on different topics, says Michael Fielding, group account director of ZenithOptimedia.
He says the unique positioning was key because the shop is ‘always looking for ways to make clients stand out – a premium position and being one of the last papers in Canada [to offer that spot] made it that much more valuable.’ He adds: ‘Newspaper is a large battleground for the financial industry. We were looking for a premium position, uncluttered, in a medium we’d use naturally.’ Fielding says the deal took approximately two months to complete. He says: ‘The Star‘s a great paper’ and ZenithOptimedia was able to convince it to sell the page-one space by ‘leveraging our current relationship, what we’ve always done historically and what we plan to do in the future.’ Asked if this has opened the floodgates for the Star, Fielding replies: ‘quite possibly, because they’ve got six other days available.’ He adds that negotiating one of those days for another client would be considered if it were appropriate for that client.
La Presse offers tween access with new subsection
On Jan. 16, Montreal’s La Presse launched its new ‘Oups’ subsection, which will be inserted every Sunday into the newspaper’s first section. Targeted to eight- to 14-year-olds, the colour pages present articles and columns on topics of interest to the tween set, like music and video games. Jean Durocher, VP, sales and marketing, says this will give advertisers special access to an increasingly important group of consumers. Marc Bourassa, senior director of national advertising, says there were no advertisers in the first edition because it’s brand new and people wanted to see what it was going to be like, but his department is ramping up efforts in such tween-friendly categories as video games and milk.
‘Oups’ has also gone online at http://www.cyberpresse.ca/oups. Updated daily, the Web component will develop original interactive synergies for young surfers and include advertising. La Presse is the leading daily newspaper in Canada’s French-language market. It’s published seven days a week and has a readership of 840,000.
Canadian Idol welcomes back L’Oreal
With the announcement last week of Canadian Idol‘s massive countrywide talent search, L’Oreal and CTV also inked a deal for the cosmetics company to return for its third season as the show’s lead sponsor. The sponsorship will be similar to previous years with L’Oreal products and stylists featured during the show (as well as at the auditions) in addition to traditional media spots.
L’Oreal is moving the focus away from product placement to organic integration. The use of specific L’Oreal products will evolve as the show does with stylists working with the contestants to produce unique looks characteristic to each performer. L’Oreal will also have a strong backstage presence with its in-house stylists providing self-help beauty expertise so that each performer and audience member can recreate the looks at home using L’Oreal products.
Expedia ties in for Apprentice-themed cruise
One word: finally! Those who have been waiting with bated breath for something to come along that captures their love of pseudo-celebrities, The Apprentice, and big boats needn’t wait any longer. The eight-night Apprentice cruise, launched by Expedia.com and Trump World Magazine, will travel from New York to the Virgin Islands and will feature autograph sessions and photo opportunities with Apprentice cast members as well as a ‘behind the scenes’ Q&A session.
On-board competitions similar to those performed on The Apprentice will be held for cash prizes as well as a grand prize of $15,000 and a luxury trip to Seattle to spend a day as Expedia’s CEO. Cruise participants will have the opportunity to attend a send-off party ‘featuring’ Donald Trump, though no word yet as to whether they will be allowed to make eye contact with him. For a small, added expense, travelers can play golf with the cast members or even hit the town with them for a pub crawl in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The cruise is scheduled for Sept. 26, with prices starting at around $2,000 per person.
