FleishmanHillard Canada is paving the road to a whole new type of PR shop with its work for the Ontario Road Builders’ Association (ORBA).
The agency’s recent work for the organization marks both its first radio ad for a Canadian client and its first video spot to be broadcast on television in Canada.
Fleishman has previously done video work for digital channels, and last year it created TV and radio spots that ran in the Bahamas, but its ORBA campaign is its first above-the-line work broadcast in Canada.
Originally launched online this spring, the campaign includes three video ads conceived by Fleishman’s Toronto office and produced by Studio M that juxtapose traditional offices with construction sites. The hero spot, for example, illustrates the careless way cars race past construction workers without concern for their safety.
Backed by a social buy, the video attracted 865,000 views in its first month online and generated 1.4 million social media impressions and 5,100 likes and 3,500 shares.
Originally, the three videos were designed to accompany media pitches and run on social media. The media relations execution generated 7,330,820 impressions with coverage on CP24, CBC and in the Brampton Guardian.
After seeing the press coverage and social traction the campaign picked up, the ORBA decided to put a media buy behind one of the spots and gave the green light for an additional radio ad.
The radio spot drops an office worker character in the middle of a highway to draw similar parallels between the two workplaces and reinforce that construction sites should be respected by drivers.
Jacob Porpossian, digital strategy and creative program director at FleishmanHillard, said the campaign was an example of the “channel agnostic” approach Fleishman now takes to client communications. When going into pitches, Porpossian said the agency focused first on a concept that would solve the potential client’s business problem, then on the best medium for the execution.
In the case of the ORBA, Fleishman pitched the idea against three other firms as a content-led PR initiative, then later added a media buy to bring additional scale to the campaign’s second phase.
The campaign is a product of the creative team Fleishman’s Toronto office launched about two and a half years ago to support clients looking for videos and other content. At first, the team was just Porpossian, but it has now grown to seven members including the agency’s former creative and strategic planning director, Helene Larochelle, who was named vice-president and creative director of the agency in May.
The creative team now produces work for several of the agency’s clients including M&Ms, Uncle Ben’s and Energizer Canada.
While the agency is now producing creative, Porpossian said the goal was not to turn Fleishman into an ad agency. “For us, it’s not about creating a piece of content we then put a bunch of money with a media buy against to put it in people’s faces,” he said. “The way we approach our content is about engagement first and foremost and how the story is going to earn people’s attention…a media buy is an add-on to help tell that story.”
The ads are running for four weeks in Ontario. Media Sales Lab handled the media buy.
