The Campaign in Canada era officially got underway on Wednesday, with our splashy launch party at Amazon’s Toronto headquarters—where the sparkling view from high atop the city was matched only by the presence of nearly 150 of the country’s creative, marketing and media leaders.
In addition to catching up with colleagues over good food and drink, attendees were treated to an engaging panel discussion about how streaming content is transforming advertising, as well as the unveiling of our newest editorial venture, the Campaign Cup.
The groundwork for Campaign’s arrival in Canada was laid last year, when London-based Haymarket Media Group acquired The Message, the independent marketing media brand launched by David Brown and Chris Powell in 2018.
After several months of extensive behind-the-scenes work, the completely new CampaignCanada.ca launched Feb. 15, with Canada becoming the first market to unveil the new-look site that will eventually be rolled out across the entire Campaign network.
The evening began with a panel discussion featuring four digital advertising experts talking about the rise of connected TV and the role it can play in advertising strategy.
"There's a lot of opportunity for telling stories; a lot of opportunity for engagement and interactivity," said Richard Ivey, chief client officer at Media Experts.
Meanwhile, the Campaign Cup tournament asks you, our readers, to choose between 32 of the greatest Canadian ads of the past quarter-century.
It arose out of the sentiments we heard repeatedly while reporting on our ambitious “Made in Canada” editorial package that you can find here. Over and over again, we were told that the best Canadian creativity can stand toe-to-toe with that from other nations.
We agreed, but then we had a thought: What if we found a way to remind our readers of just how great that work is and then asked them to help choose the “greatest” of them all.
And since we’re nearly into March, we decided to structure the competition as a March Madness-style competition, with the 32 campaigns squaring off in a series of head-to-head matchups that will be whittled down to a single winner over the next month or so.
The process began with the Campaign editorial team reviewing dozens and dozens of potential campaigns. While the very idea of “advertising” feels very different from what it was in 2000, we put an emphasis on traditional advertising campaigns (less about the PR and stunts and more about paid media), for real commercial brands. We weren’t rigid in those criteria, but we used them to guide us.
And while every member of the Campaign staff has some personal favourites—for David it’s “Ah! Ha!”, for Chris it’s "Start the Car," and for Emma it’s "Touch, Cat”—we wanted to remove any personal bias from the competition by asking readers to vote for their favourite ad.
Haem Roy, enterprise marketing lead for Amazon Ads, helped with the first-round draw using our decidedly low-tech, yet highly effective, ping-pong ball system. We debated seeding the ads so as to avoid epic head-to-head matchups right out of the gate, but decided that a randomized draw would only add to fun.
Not surprisingly, our new English owners were immediately curious about what’s known in World Cup soccer as a “group of death.” And we’ve got some truly intriguing match-ups right out of the gate.
