Vachon is recognizing its anniversary with a birthday campaign that keeps with the playful tone it has kept for much of its 100-year history.

Longtime agency partner Cossette combed the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) for suitably dour images of what look like Depression-era people – and then brightened their black and white visages with full colour Vachon cake beards complete, with bite marks made to look like a smile.

These images are accompanied by claims there was “no joy prior to 1923,” the year the company was founded and the start of it becoming interwoven into the cultural fabric of Quebec and deserving of a campaign to match, according to Maryna Shcherbyna, senior marketing manager at parent company Bimbo Canada.

“This year, for such a big milestone, we wanted to go above and beyond and do something really big and extraordinary,” Shcherbyna says. “It’s very simple, yet very powerful at the same time.”

The creative was inspired by the idea that life was hardly a piece of cake during the era, and that posing for pictures was a really serious undertaking.

“It’s very on-brand,” she says of the tongue-in-cheek approach, one Vachon deployed recently when it made light of the theft of one of its own trucks in a campaign. Online video spots showed bandits robbing a warehouse in grainy, CCTV footage.

To keep abreast of the “developing story,” the agency also created Vachon’s very first TikTok account, which is a platform the brand is leaning into again for its 100th birthday campaign, an attempt to reach younger demos. On its official Tiktok account, it’s celebrating with Joe Louis filters and a birthday candle in one of its iconic cakes.

Shcherbyna tells strategy that the CPG is taking a three-pronged approach to the 100th anniversary campaign: in addition to a standard campaign rollout of OOH in key markets, online video and various social media assets, there will be point-of-sale materials coming later this summer for top-sellers like Joe Louis in store, along with a few surprises the brand is sharing at a later date.

There is no television but “a lot of digital media, which works really well for us,” Shcherbyna says.

Ad spend is in keeping with prior spring efforts, she says. Starcom handled the media buy.