Canadian Tire put its Motomaster Eliminator battery to the test on Wednesday during the Bridgestone NHL Winter Classic, launching a new TV and online campaign that placed the car part in a custom-made ice truck.
With TV creative from Taxi, media from Touche!, Notch working on the online video and Fuse sourcing the ice sculpture and truck creation from Iceculture, the campaign centred around a 60-second spot showcasing the ice truck.
“We came up with a brief that played on the expression that people say their car is ‘as cold as ice’ and we wanted to demonstrate that with a new campaign,” says Andrew Barrett, consulting associate VP of strategic marketing, Canadian Tire. “Taxi came back to us with the idea of a print ad that showed a truck frozen in a block of ice. I said we could do more than that, to create a truck out of ice and make a full multimedia execution out of it.”
Barrett says the 60-second spot, which played during the Bridgestone NHL Winter Classic will only be shown in its entirety once, similar to a Super Bowl spot. He adds the lead-up to the campaign was also similar to placing a spot during the Super Bowl, with preview ads being posted on Facebook, and digital spots running online yesterday alongside the TV ad.
Creating a one-day spot is new for Canadian Tire, said Barrett. Also new for the brand around this spot was the Facebook Newsfeed buy that ran yesterday, with everyone in Canada over the age of 25 seeing the ice truck ad in their feed on the site. In addition, the ad was promoted on Twitter and through a YouTube masthead takeover. Additional spots on the creation of the ice truck and its drive through Hensall, ON are available online. The ice truck’s 1.5 km trip is being submitted to the Guinness World Records for the longest distance covered by a self-propelled ice sculpture.
Barrett says there were challenges around building and driving a custom made ice truck, including not knowing if the vehicle would crack as soon as it turned right or left and not being able to shoot the clear ice during the daytime because of the frost and hairline cracks that formed from the light.
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