Blacks is tugging at the heartstrings with “Life is a blank canvas,” a new campaign which positions the retailer as the facilitator of warm memories.
Developed by Cossette, the campaign is running across English Canada and includes digital, social and POS, and marks the agency’s first effort on behalf of the brand since taking over from Taxi as AOR late last year.
To bring the idea to life, the brand created a video titled “Anna’s Mother’s Day Surprise,” which documents the real-life story of a mother and daughter.
Looking for a special way to mark Mother’s Day, Anna prints and frames old photographs of her family and hangs them in her home. Her mother, a Russian immigrant with very few photos of her own, is overcome with emotion when she sees them. But Anna has one more surprise for her mother. Opening the door to an empty nursery, Anna reveals she’s pregnant. “These ones are for the moments to come,” she says, gesturing towards blank, framed photographs on the nursery walls.
The brand is pushing the video via pre-roll, on YouTube and across its social channels. Since being posted just over a week ago, it’s racked up 75,000 views.
“We’re feeling good about the early signs, people are looking at it and sharing it, and it’s still a month to go before Mother’s Day,” said Greg Shortall, associate creative director at Cossette. “It’s an emotional story that exists just outside of Mother’s Day too, that any child or any mother can identify with and feel something about.”
The advent of digital technology and the popularity of smartphones forced Blacks to undergo a revamp in 2014 with a new online and in-store model, and according to Jamie Cordwell, associate creative director at Cossette, “Life is a blank canvas” signals a new, more emotional direction for Blacks, one that differentiates the brand from others in the space.
“When we took the Blacks business and were looking around at the category, it was very focused on retail and who has the best price,” Cordwell said. “There was no emotion in any of the advertising that we could see. We really wanted to bring that emotion back in…remind people that there’s a reason why we take photographs.”
The campaign is aimed at what Shortall called “stroller moms” in their late twenties and early thirties.
“We know that these people are the ones that are there with their smartphones, they’re there with their tablets and they’re taking tons of photographs,” said Shortall.
“We’re trying to encourage a behaviour change. Instead of just having [photos] sit on your phone or on your Facebook page, actually immortalize them in tangible formats.”
Elements of “Life is a blank canvas” will be rolling out in stages. Cossette Media handled the buy, while Edelman is handling PR.
