For Mastercard’s holiday campaign, The Deli created an immersive experience to life in small-town B.C.
At The Deli, the best projects start with a question: “How are we going to pull this off?”
“That’s our type of project,” says partner and executive producer Ben Robinson. “When a creative team says they need to launch a product into space but they’ve never built a rocket before, who would do that? They call The Deli to find out.”
The Toronto-based production company is built around delivering campaigns that haven’t been done before – headline-grabbing, logistically complex, creatively ambitious ideas that demand more than just standard execution.
The Deli’s goal is to deliver “wow” campaigns, integrating film and experiential as complimentary tools to bring an idea to life.
“If your brand is looking to make an impact, to get eyeballs and really turn heads, and it’s a logistically complicated ask, we’re the shop to call because we have such a wide breadth of experience making these ‘wow’ campaigns,” Robinson says.At the core of The Deli’s offering is its ability to integrate film and experiential – not as separate services, but as complementary tools that can be used independently or together, depending on what the idea demands.
The Deli’s immersive experience for Mastercard’s holiday campaign delivered upwards of 140 million media impressions.
“We’re not reinventing anything, but we are introducing a creative layer to the Canadian market that hasn’t been readily available before,” says founder and managing director Kevin Saffer. “It’s not just getting a script, shooting it and passing it off. It’s being able to see through a campaign or creative problem from the nugget of an idea all the way to delivering the final outputs.”To further support this integrated model, The Deli recently launched its Experiential Director Roster – a handpicked team of creative leads who oversee experiential campaigns with the same level of vision and oversight typically reserved for film.
Mastercard holiday campaign: The Deli turned a small town into an immersive children’s book experience, activating at eight different small businesses across town, all in six weeks.
“It functions the same way a film roster does,” says Robinson. “When The Deli receives a brief, an experiential director is put on the project to lead the creative charge, which includes pitch, pre-production and execution. Think of it like a film director, but for live events, immersive productions and stunts.”Consider the shop’s Mastercard holiday campaign as an example. McCann, Mastercard’s AOR, had the idea to create a children’s book and promote it in a small town, featuring its local small businesses. The Deli had six weeks to make it real – publishing the book and building a live holiday-themed experience across multiple locations in Fort Langley, BC. “We activated at eight different small businesses, created large-scale sculptures and an immersive choose-your-own adventure experience for the holiday season,” says Robinson. Mastercard reported a 125% national transaction increase, with local businesses reporting record sales and the event itself garnering upwards of 140 million media impressions.
Pizza Pizza’s new XXL offering: What started as a stunt, quickly bloomed into a fully-formed campaign.
A similar blend of film and experiential happened in The Deli’s campaign for Pizza Pizza. The ask: hoist a 20-by-20-foot pizza box from a construction crane in downtown Toronto to launch a new XXL pizza. But what started as a stunt quickly bloomed into a fully-formed campaign – and The Deli was able to manage it all. “Our experience in both realms allows us to effectively execute on these projects that are a little… out of the box, pun intended… which is a unique offering amongst legacy production houses in Toronto and Canada,” adds Saffer.
And while not every campaign will require both approaches, The Deli is structured to lead with the format that makes the most sense for the creative. “They’re very different things,” says Robinson of film and experiential. “But they’re not mutually exclusive. In a perfect world, we blend both. But sometimes we do straight XM stuff and sometimes we do traditional commercial advertising production.”
Audiences increasingly seek theatrical, real-life brand interactions, so Robinson says experiential work is becoming a requirement, not a nice-to-have. “For brands to stay relevant, they need to do things ‘in real life,’” he says. “Gen Z and Gen Alpha crave those extended reality experiences, live events, theatrical experiences and big scale stunts… they’re all a part of the future, so the production company of that future needs to be one that can service all those different aspects.”
As brand campaigns grow more complex and audiences demand more real-world connection, The Deli’s hybrid model isn’t just a differentiator – it’s a blueprint. With film and experiential working in tandem, they’re not chasing what’s next. They’re already building it.
And that’s The Deli’s vision.
CONTACT:
Kevin Saffer
Co-founder
kevin@thedeli.com
Ben Robinson
Partner/Executive Producer
ben@thedeli.com
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