Telefilm Canada has picked No Fixed Address to lead a national PSA campaign to entice Canadians back to cinemas.

The campaign is part of the Telefilm Canada Recovery Fund for Arts, Culture, Heritage and Sport Sectors announced by the Government of Canada last June, and comprises $9 million allocated towards complimentary promotional initiatives to encourage Canadian audiences back to cinemas. The source of the campaign’s budget is not Telefilm’s annual Parliamentary appropriation, but is additional money on top of that.

NFA was awarded the mandate for the 360-degree marketing campaign, which will be executed and promoted over the course of 2022, with the first major campaign elements coming to life this spring.

“This is an opportunity to create an unbranded campaign, which puts forward the category of cinema itself versus the focus on Telefilm,” says Flore-Anne Ducharme, partner and general manager of NFA Montreal. “It’s also an important, meaningful way of activating the economic recovery of movie theatres, on top of stimulating and promoting Canadian culture.

NFA will deploy Telefilm Canada’s mission nationally, in both official languages, with its Montreal office leading the campaign and leveraging the agency’s national presence by activating all of its divisions.

With its mandate, the agency will be responsible for strategic planning, media buying and planning, creative concept development and execution of both traditional and digital communications, activations and public relations.

“At our core NFA is a creative agency that has the ability to bring medium-agnostic ideas to life,” Ducharme says. “This work is an exceptional opportunity for NFA to do just that – develop a large-scale campaign that is brought to life across all of our departments inclusive of strategy, creative, production, digital, public relations and media.”

Ducharme tells strategy the entire team is at the table solving this challenge together, and that the shop was built on delivering solutions that are best for the problem rather than a narrowed focused solution within one discipline.

“Our model is one of collaboration, set up to service a truly integrated account such as this,” Ducharme says. “For a client like Telefilm, we work as one big office, one big family across our platform.”

According to Ducharme, NFA has been steadily growing as a result of new business and organic growth, but did not cite this account win as a specific example.

Telefilm, meanwhile, did not disclose the RFP incumbents.

In 2017, as reported in strategy, Telefilm turned its camera on Canadians, with The Hive’s “Watch Us, Watch Us,” campaign, seven short online videos that featured a diverse group of people watching and reacting to Canadian films, including, for example, Breakaway and Turbo Kid. 

Canadian Heritage crown corporation Telefilm administered funding programs of the Canada Media Fund (CMF), which totalled $441.8 million in fiscal 2020-2021.

Other elements of its Recovery Fund include an additional $10 million in reopening funds to film festivals across the country through its Promotion Program, with up to $16 million of recovery funds allocated to the Theatrical Exhibition Program.

Yesterday, the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television, which is supported in part by Telefilm, its Premier Partner, announced nominations for the 2022 Canadian Screen Awards, including Best Documentary Short nominee Nuisance Bear (pictured, above).