MTS moves from awareness to hard sales push
Some guys can’t take a hint, but since the latest ads for Amour need to appear on broadcast television, perhaps that’s for the best.
The campaign to promote the Manitoba Telecom Services (MTS)-run on-demand adult film channel parodies a few well-worn porn tropes – the pizza guy, the pool boy – with intentionally bad acting and slightly more décollatage than a typical beer ad.
The campaign comes from Dare Vancouver, which was recognized for its previous Amour campaign last year, getting shortlisted in the Cannes Lions Film competition and winning gold at the Bessies.
That campaign had a relatively large media buy to drive TV viewers to the service’s website. “The numbers we saw were the craziest I’d ever seen for increase in web traffic,” said Bryan Collins, executive creative director at the agency. “It was something like 12,000%.
“But that’s not the path-to-purchase. You can’t buy it online. You order it straight from your TV.”
That’s why the new television segments are only running as interstitials on MTS-owned stations after primetime. They only reach those who already subscribe to MTS services, encouraging them to click-through to Amour with their TV remotes.
Print and out-of-home executions are also appearing in “select locations like resto bars, where patrons are of a certain age,” said Rob Sweetman, co-ECD at Dare.
As rare and seemingly freeing as clients like Amour can be for agencies looking to do something a bit daring, hitting the right tone is a creative challenge, said Sweetman. After all, MTS is a public-facing brand with more services than just an adult entertainment channel.
“When we first started talking to [MTS] they weren’t too keen on the use of humour,” Sweetman said. “We tried a bunch of different angles on it, and [this work] was one of those things that was just right when we wrote it. The client agreed.”
