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Tortillas. They’re not just for fajita night.

That’s the underlying message behind Dempster’s recent “Hug Your Food” campaign, featuring  a YouTube video with a catchy jingle that demonstrates six meal ideas that incorporate tortillas.

“A lot of consumers don’t know what to do with tortillas once they get past that first meal,” says Mike Ponter, senior marketing director – meal occasions and innovation, Canada Bread Company. “What we tried to do with the video was  inspire them with interesting and creative ways to come up with meal solutions for their families.”

For instance, one recipe in the video is a banana berry crunch wrap, more of a breakfast or dessert occasion. As the video plays, annotations appear next to the animated ingredients and viewers who click are taken to a site with the recipe and prep instructions. A menu with six recipes also appears at the end of the ad.

The brand and agency Cundari chose an upbeat, light-hearted approach to connect with its target audience of females 25 to 44, enlisting audio house Grayson Matthews to create a catchy jingle.

“We wanted it to be fun and light-hearted,” Ponter says. “It is about inspiration, which is why a lot of the song is about hugging your food.

“We started really from the jingle first,” he adds. “We thought we had a really catchy song  and built it out from there.”

Sean Ganann, group CD at Cundari, adds it was “refreshing” for the agency to take a more positive approach.

“In advertising we have a tendency to be a little bit cynical sometimes,” Ganann says. “Knowing that we were talking to families, we looked for a really fun way to do it.”

That included featuring fresh food with faces drawn on them and working with director Sean Wainsteim to animate them. Ganann says Cundari constructed the kitchen, worked with a food stylist and had someone use sticks to make the food move.

Using fresh food was important to create “high appetite appeal” in the video, Ponter says.

The video is supported by YouTube Trueview ads, as well as mobile and display ads, focused on sites like Allrecipes.com, Urbanspoon.com and Foodnetwork.ca.

An in-store campaign, launched last month in conventional stores such as Sobeys, Metro and Walmart, a display unit with a call out to the “Hug Your Food” with food imagery, Ponter says.

Media and social media were handled in house.