In a way, RBC’s latest broadcast campaign was, inadvertently, a perfect fit for this year’s IIHF World Junior Championship.
In a disappointing tournament where the Canadian team fell well short of hopes and expectations, RBC’s spots are about overcoming failure and setback on the road to success. Narrowly, the ads focus on the game of hockey and portray three RBC sponsored athletes, Carey Price, Marie-Philip Poulin and Tyler McGregor recovering from their own personal defeats to become world-class hockey players.
But, they also underscore RBC’s “Someday” brand platform about achieving larger life goals. “To get to everyone’s someday, you have to overcome barriers,” said director of brand marketing Matt McGlynn. “Our athletes do it and we try to help our clients do it as well.”
The campaign includes two TV spots, which ran frequently during the tournament, a 30-second ad just on Price and a more anthemic 60-second ad that shows all three rising up from low points in their hockey playing lives.
“[It] talks about trials and tribulations and really shows that to get to success you have to overcome obstacles and feel failure,” he said.
A longer 2.5-minute online film goes deeper on Price’s defeat at the IIHF Under 18 World Championship in 2005 and his victory with the Junior team in 2007. RBC has been a sponsor of Hockey Canada since 1995.
While there is no shortage of hockey themed advertising during any Canadian winter, McGlynn said the RBC creative differentiates by showing “the breadth and depth of our support” for hockey, but also by talking about and showing the individual failures, personal defeats and challenges, including cancer in McGregor’s case.
“I think there is a little more tension to our creative,” said McGlynn. “We went to a space that was a little more uncomfortable [for RBC] but, that is how you get to breakthrough.”
The spots were created without the help of RBC’s usual creative partner agency BBDO which is focused on Olympic work, said McGlynn. Instead, RBC went directly to Toronto-based director Kevin Foley. Mosaic helped with digital and social amplification.
Foley previously created and shot a 10-minute film about Australian golfer Jason Day who signed on with RBC last spring.
That film, “Never Say Die,” tells Day’s story of emerging from a turbulent, troubled youth and challenges early in his pro career to become one of the best golfers in the world.
“We had some key learnings from that and we wanted to tell really human, relatable stories about our athletes,” said McGlynn.
“The Day video was a pretty transformational piece,” he said. “We learned to do unexpected things and to be a little grittier than we had been historically.”
