Tony Bennett POV

Two Agencies Announce Setting Up of Blogs

 
  by Gail Chiasson, Dec 04, 2006

Sylvain Desfossés, media planner and specialist on the 40-plus market at LXB Communication Marketing, Montreal, has launched a blog on that market segment at www.40plus.blog.com.

And after a partnership of nearly 15 years and more than 50,000 creative ideas, Tony Chapman and Bennett Klein of Capital C have decided to share their insights with the world with a daily online posting at www.capitalc.typepad.com.

"It is clear that the importance of baby boomers is increasing by leaps and bounds in the Quebec consumer market," says Desfossés. "That’s why this blog is most opportune. Not only does it allow those who are interested by this group to know more on how to reach them, but they can also contribute to develop it by participating and adding content."

Capital C's Klein says, "A brand needs to express an opinion, take a position and develop a voice in order to stay relevant, and Capital C is no different. Your perspective is a direct result of where you stand, and we need to clearly establish that stance on everything relevant to our audience."

Chapman says that a daily blog will likely prove to be one of the most demanding, yet most rewarding, challenges of his career. "Producing a post-a-day is exciting and demanding,” he says. “It forces us to think hard about things impacting our industry and our clients' business, while keeping the articles short and entertaining."

Bottling Success

November 20, 2006

By PAUL-MARK RENDON
Andrew Peller Limited, Grimsby, Ont.

2006 Marketers That Mattered
SHARI NILES

VP of marketing at Andrew Peller Limited says the vintner found a way turn a damaged crop into a new wine brand

Say the words "short crop" to anyone in the wine business and you're liable to induce a panic attack. Shari Niles, vice-president of marketing at Grimsby, Ont.-based vintner Andrew Peller Limited, knows the term all too well. It's when Mother Nature's wrath on grapes means trouble for next year's wine production.

Ontario experienced a short crop in grapes just last year, after a brutal 2004/2005 winter stomped all over the province's grape production levels. Only 20,000 metric tonnes were expected in 2005, less than half the previous year's tally of 46,000. For the $1.9 billion Ontario wine industry, a linchpin in the national wine business, it was grim news.

But for Peller, the shortage was serendipitous. It decided to devote its surviving grapes to its upmarket brands like Peller Estates Private Reserve and the Andrew Peller Signature Series, which meant having nothing to market in the $10 to $15 price range. Fortunately, plans the company had for new brands Croc Crossing and XOXO, wines that were blends of domestic and international grapes, were near fruition.

For Croc, Australian varietals of Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay or Riesling could be combined with what Ontario grapes they had. The brand could be sold at Vineyards Estate Wines, the Peller-owned retail chain, as a way to entice wine drinkers who liked all things Aussie. To borrow another beverage-based saying, it was a good way to take a lemon of a year and make lemonade. "We've got the label, we've got the wine, and we've got the story," Niles says, thinking back. "Sometimes you just get lucky."

Croc Crossing, Peller's answer to the industry's "critter brand" trend that included cutesy labelled wines like Yellowtail, Little Penguin and Naked Grape, debuted in June, 2006. Almost immediately, the brand became responsible for 20% of retail sales at the 100 Vineyards stores throughout Ontario, breathing life into revenues that had been flat for three years prior. "Within the first month and a half," says Niles, "we sold half-a-year's worth of product."

Not to be outdone, XOXO, which launched in late August as Peller's newest addition to the growing lifestyle-oriented wine segment, also managed to snag more than its fair share of the market.
Backed by a launch campaign from Toronto agency Capital C that included packaging that took its cues from the luxury fragrance world, full-colour box shippers (not the boring brown corrugate) and a spokesperson deal with model-turned-actress Tricia Helfer, a record 36,000 bottles of XOXO were shipped out in the brand's first four weeks of existence. "Not that we would ever compare ourselves to Yellowtail," says Terry Sauriol, Peller's director of marketing, "but it took them four months to hit that same level of sales."

Peller's marketing plans for XOXO were even enough to convince the British Columbia Liquor Distribution Branch to launch it in all of its stores on the same day throughout the province. No beer, spirit or wine company had ever received the same level of support, Sauriol says.
In July, Peller also proved it could lead by marketing its French Cross brand as Canada's first domestically produced, eco-friendly Tetra Pak of wine. In the period since its launch, it led its segment with 28% market share, compared to the 18% owned by French Rabbit-an import brand that had a one-year head start.

The 2006 summer, long and dry, bodes well for next year's grape harvest. "This year is looking extremely positive," Niles says. And with the type of year she's had, a marketing short crop isn't anywhere in the forecast.

Canadian promo shops bring home Globes

MARKETING DAILY
October 2004

Canada made an impressive showing at the 2004 Globes Awards in Aventura, Fla. on Tuesday night.
Canadian promo agencies took home one Globe (top prize in the category), one gold, four silvers and one bronze at the show, which honours outstanding promotion, event, entertainment, sports and direct marketing campaigns from around the world.

Strateco-Blitz and Fuel Industries took home the Globe in Best Brand Building Campaign for Getnlucky.com, an interactive game promoting sales of Panasonic phones.

Capital C Communications won gold in Best Retail Account-Specific or Channel Marketing Activity for its Hallmark Canada campaign “Butterflies Are Free.” The same campaign was awarded a silver in the Most Innovative Idea or Concept category. Capital C, which won 11 PROMO! Awards on home turf in September, took home another silver in Florida for Project Goalie, its Molson Canadian Bubba promotion featuring Don Cherry.

Other Canadian winners included The Marketing Store, for Dugg.ca, part of McDonald's “I’m Lovin’ It” campaign; The GEM Group, for its Purolator Tackle Hunger campaign and TrojanOne, for Nike Canada’s RunTo.
Best of show went to J.Walter Thompson of India for its Pepsi World Cup campaign, which was tied in to the cricket World Cup. The campaign also won the Globe for Best Sponsorship or Tie-In Campaign.
Only winners of the PROMO! Awards, produced by the Canadian Association of Promotional Marketing Agencies (CAPMA), were eligible to enter the global competition, which were sponsored by the

Marketing Agencies Association (MAA) Worldwide and were held following the MAA Worldwide’s annual fall meeting and conference.

Hallmark flies away with Best of Promo Show

MARKETING MAGAZINE
October 1, 2004

The Hallmark Canada Butterfly promotion flew away with Best of Show honours at the fifth annual PROMO! Awards held in Toronto last night.

The event, produced by the Canadian Association of Promotional Marketing Agencies, awarded a total of 16 golds across 15 categories.

Toronto’s Capital C took home 11 awards, including five golds and Best of Show honours for the Hallmark butterfly program, which included a paper butterfly that purchasers could manually wind up and insert in their purchased card. Once opened, the cards would release the butterfly, which appeared to flutter away. Customers were encouraged to collect a total of six different butterfly varieties.
The Butterfly promotion won gold for Most Innovative Concept or Idea.

Capital C’s other golds included two for Molson Canadian’s Don Cherry promotion, which won in the
Best Multi Discipline Campaign and Best Sponsorship or Tie-in categories.

Cap C also received gold for
Best Dealer or Sales Force Activity for a Bell ExpressVu promotion called “Mission Possible.”

Toronto’s Takamatsu Group won gold for Best Activity Generating Brand Awareness and Trial for The

Loyalty Group’s partnership effort with Universal Music. Takamatsu also won gold in the Best Business-to-Business Category for its work for Maple Leaf Foods.

Toronto’s TrojanOne received two golds, one in the Best Brand Building category for its street level “Cold Crew” campaign for BC Dairy. TrojanOne also won gold in the Best Event Marketing Campaign category for Nike Canada’s RunTo campaign last summer.

B Street Communications won gold in the Best Use of Interactive Media category, for Cineplex Odeon’s Reelm@il online promotion.

Gold in the same category was also awarded to The Marketing Store, for its buzz-generating Dugg.ca Web site for McDonald’s Restaurants of Canada.

Toronto-based Ryan Partnership Canada won gold for Most Effective Long-Term Promotion Marketing Campaign for Unilever’s Dove.

Millenium, also of Toronto, won gold in the Best Activity Generating Brand Volume for its SpongeBob Squarepants pop-up card promotion for Parmalat.

M Marketing Services won gold for Best Activity Generating Brand Loyalty for Visa Canada’s win-what-you-buy promotion.

The Gem Group won gold for Best Cause or Charity Marketing Campaign for Purolator Courier’s fundraising efforts, which raised 35,000 kg of food for local food banks, while raising Purolator’s profile in the same communities.

Fuse Marketing Group of Toronto won gold in the Best Small Budget Campaign for its promotion for Tetley Canada, which partnered Tetley with fashion retailer Nygard.

–Paul-Mark Rendon

Capital C Runs Below Radar:

NATIONAL POST
2003                                                                                             

While most outside the ad business think the business is all about big-budget television campaigns and the occasional print or radio push, Tony Chapman’s Toronto firm happily toils at creating retail-sore level promotions.  There’s the humble Frito Lay ship display with a cardboard cutout of Homer Simpson, the slightly more human caricature of Don Cherry touting Molson’s Bubba mini-keg.
It’s the kind of business most ad agencies either turn their noses up at, or don’t do very well.  Enter Capital C Communications, a promotion agency founded 10 years ago by Mr. Chapman.  “We have grows plus 80% for the last couple of years, so that says to me there is an immense amount of business out there” he said.
In an era of shrinking budgets, advertisers have less money to put toward mega-advertising blitzes, and look to close the deal where consumers come in direct contact with their products – at the store.  “When I started this business you kind of put up this big drift net, which was television, and you caught a lot of fish in it.  Now the sophisticated marketers are sort of fly-fishing the fish that mean the most to them,” said Mr. Chapman.  “Promotional marketing, the world we compete in, plays directly to that, where we can designs programs that appeal to a certain shopper based on the [stores] they are in.”
The Toronto promotions house has grown from 18 staffers two years ago to 53 currently, and the company stubbornly manages to hang onto existing clients and snag new ones – mainly by word of mouth.
This fall it captured a chunk of Canada Post’s promotions work and more recently won its first U.S. account, as promotions assignment from auto aftermarket chain Pep Boys. 
Larry Stevenson, former CEO of book retailer Chapters, was hired in April as CEO of Pep Boys and knew Mr. Chapman as a business acquaintance.  He suggested Capital C pitch its services to his company’s marketing department.
Capital C’s task involves new brand positioning and store design for the 595-store chain of automotive parts stores, Mr. Stevenson said.  “It’s basically helping us think through the brand, what the brand stands for and what it should look like and a little bit of input on store design.”
The new Pep Boys will be made public after a dealer presentation next February, he said.
The centrepeice of Capital C’s efforts is the “big idea” brainstorming session, in which the agency’s top brass and clients throw ideas and concepts against the wall to see what can be turned into sales promotions.
On a recent visit to the promotion house, marketers from Canada Post participated in their kick-off brainstorming session.  (The post office’s three year contract doesn’t start until January).
Canada Post moved from one agency it had used over the past decade to five shops for advertising, direct marketing, and promotions.
As for Capital C, Mr. Chapman said ad agencies are looking to grab some of the business going to promotions specialists such as his, but they are hampered by high cost structures, slow turnaround times and creative egos.
“The culture of a big agency is the creative guys really want to do TV ad they really wants peer recognition with other creative directors,” Mr. Chapman said.

Canada’s Top 5 Hottest Agencies

Profit Magazine
March, 2003

Canada’s Top 5 Hottest Agencies

Capital C Communications
Established: 1992
Major clients: Molson, Frito-Lay, Effem Foods, Hallmark, Bell Canada, Pepsi

Tony Chapman, CEO of Capital C Communications, likens his creative team to snipers unleashing potent slap-shots when a hockey game is in overtime: they are out to “break the tie.”

“Most of our effort is directed at what we can do to add value to a product so the consumer stops and buys it, from packaging and point-of-sale displays to promotional contests and loyalty programs,” says Chapman.  “Anything we can do to break the tie for our clients in a very congested retail environment.”
Capital C’s work is certainly getting noticed: the agency has won nine of the 27 gold Promo Awards doled out by Marketing magazine over the past three years.  More important to the Toronto-based firm: customers are clamoring for its services.  The promotional agency’s revenue doubled over the past year.
For Chapman, effective promotions require all the bang of a KISS concert.  “Any time you can create an offer that makes people stop in their tracks,” says Chapman, “You’re doing a great job of getting them to consider buying your product.”  One of his fondest examples is the “$1 Million Cash Grab” promotion Capital C created for Doritos and Lays chips.  The campaign contributed in-store displays full of chips, Pepsi products and cardboard cut-outs of characters from “The Simpsons”, plus a contest in which $1 million would go to the person who collected all nine Simpsons characters hidden in bags of chips.  (The prize went unclaimed.)

“What we had to do was get the salespeople that sell the product into the stores excited, we had to get the stores excited, and we had to make sure it was relevant to the consumer and [reflected] the brand,” says Chapman.  “It was a four-dimensional chessboard.”

Stores were so impressed that they dedicated 100 linear feet of shelf spaces to the displays.  “In this industry, a 10- or 12-foot display is impressive,” notes Chapman.  “Any time you can get your brand away from the dark caverns of the shelves, you can get a sales uptick of up to 1,000%.”

In this case, Hostess Frito-Lay posted a 19% volume increase and a three-point share increase.  The display also won a Golden Homey, and international prize awarded annually by Fox Studios for the best use of a Fox property in a promotion or licensed product.

But size alone won’t break the tie, says Chapman, who believes every promotion should appeal to the head, heart and hands: include a message that’s easy to understand, create emotional excitement in the consumer and make participation easy – say, by simply purchasing a bag of chips.

If this all sounds too big for your budget, be assured that great promotions don’t have to cost too much.  To wit: a Valentine’s Day stunt for Hallmark in which eight men sat in La-Z-Boy recliners in a downtown Toronto mall watching Love Story, with a chair and satellite system going to the man who endured the renowned tearjerker the longest (seven hours, it turned out).  “It was an incredibly low-budget promotion, but it got incredible media coverage,” says Chapman.  “we even had national TV networks come down to cover it.”

La-Z-Boys and cardboard cut-outs won’t work for every company, but Chapman believes new media should: once you understand who your customers are and what motivates them to buy, technology can help you reach them by the hundreds of the hundreds of thousands.  “The

Capital C Takes Best of Show

PubZone.com
November 2004

Capital C Takes Best of Show at CAPMA Awards Show

Capital C, Toronto-based promotional marketing agency, won Best of Show honours at the PROMO! Awards, held a month ago in Toronto.
The Company also won 11 other awards, including five Golds, at the Canadian Association of Promotional Marketing Agencies event.Â

Capital C won a Gold and the Best of Show designation for its 2004 Hallmark 'Butterflies are Free' campaign, which also won Golds for Most Innovative Concept or Idea and Best Retail Account-Specific or Channel Marketing Activity.Â

The 11 week campaign, which launched last June, offered all Hallmark Gold Crown customers a free wind-up butterfly with the purchase of any greeting card. Consumers could wind the butterfly and place it in their Hallmark card. When the card was opened, the butterfly would ‘flutter’ out, creating a one-of-a-kind greeting card experience. The campaign was responsible for a 9.8% increase in transactions for Hallmark and unit sales were up, during the campaign, by 14%.

Capital C also won Best Multi-Discipline Campaign and Best Sponsorship or Tie-In Campaign for Molson Canadian; and Best Dealer or Sales Force Activity for Bell ExpressVu.Â

Capital C won Silver Awards for its campaigns for Frito Lay Canada and Pepsi-QTG; and a Bronze Award for its Pepsi-QTG work.

Unilever begins online promotion for Thermasilk

Adnews, 2005
Unilever has begun an online promotion called "Hit On My Hot Guy" for its Thermasilk line of hair care products. The effort, aimed at 15- to 24-year-old women, is based on a website at www.hitonmyhotguy.ca. Visitors to this site can construct a "Hot Guy" and send it to friends in order to win prizes. The site also contains hair care advice. The initiative is being operated in association with the AOL Media Network in the form of an online poll called the "Hot Guy Face-Off." Participants in this poll will vote on the hotness of various male celebrities. The campaign, which began on Oct. 13, includes exposure on various Canadian Internet properties, including AOL Canada. "This campaign allows us to reach an Internet savvy audience with our key brand messages in a relevant and creative way," said Shachin Ghelani, assistant Thermasilk brand manager. "The site combines two things that are very important to this target: Guys and their hair. In terms of driving awareness of the program, the interactive contest and microsite through AOL are great ways of driving additional awareness of the program in a very unique way." The campaign was created by Capital C. Media buying was handled by PHD Canada. Both agencies are based in Toronto.