Canadian Tire has just two words for you: “Wanna Play.”
The retailer has introduced the latest iteration of its 18-month-old brand platform “We All Play for Canada,” timed to coincide with the FIFA Women’s World Cup and featuring Canadian soccer star Christine Sinclair.
“Wanna Play” (“Veux-tu jouer” in Quebec) launched last week with a 30-second TV spot created by Toronto agency Cleansheet Communications. The media buy by Touché! includes ads on TSN, CTV and RDS telecasts of Women’s World Cup matches, as well as other conventional and specialty channels.
The spot features youngsters engaged in various forms of play, as well as sports fans celebrating a Sinclair goal, while the voiceover states “For as long as play brings us together, we’ll bring all we can to play.” The spot ends with a screen featuring both the Canadian Tire and Canadian Soccer Association logos.
Susan O’Brien, vice-president of strategic marketing for Canadian Tire, said the goal is to underscore the importance of play among Canadian youth, particularly on the eve of the summer holidays.
“The idea was really going back to pure unstructured play, back to the days when you literally just walked to your neighbour’s house and knocked on the door,” said O’Brien. “When there wasn’t necessarily this thing called an organized play date.
“When you think of people who have children today, they all look back and remember that as defining for them as kids,” said O’Brien. “When you got a collection of kids together, you had to figure out what to do. You had to actually come up with games, and if you didn’t have the right equipment you had to improvise.”
According to recent data from Statistics Canada, total daily sedentary time for Canadian children and youth is approximately 8.6 hours per day, or 62% of their waking hours. Sedentary time rises with increasing age.
Canadian Tire’s YouTube channel also features a series of digital shorts with Sinclair talking about scoring a goal on home soil, the Canadian women’s team and which teams she is excited to play in the Women’s World Cup.
Sinclair is also featured on an Instagram video, while Olympic trampolinist Rosie MacLennan has also posted a Wanna Play-themed video on her Twitter account. The company is also soliciting content from other brand ambassadors, all of which is being aggregated on a dedicated Wanna Play microsite.
“We’re really hoping to create a bit of a movement,” said O’Brien.
First introduced in the lead-up to the 2014 Sochi Olympics, “We All Play for Canada” has “absolutely had a meaningful impact” on the Canadian Tire brand in the ensuing months, said O’Brien.
“It’s an opportunity for us to talk about our values and how much we care about Canada as a country,” said O’Brien. “We’re a Canadian retailer through and through, so we feel a responsibility to making sure our nation stays healthy and strong.”
According to the company’s internal brand health tracker, Canadians seeing the “Team Photo” ad that kicked off the campaign strongly agreed that the campaign made them “feel good about Canadian Tire,” that it was “personally meaningful” and gave them the impression that the retailer “understands and supports communities in Canada.”
Research also found people 25-54 were significantly more likely to say the campaign would increase their interest in shopping at Canadian Tire versus those 55+.
Another 60-second version of the “Wanna Play” ad will run around the upcoming NHL draft. While O’Brien wouldn’t confirm, she coyly told Marketing “it’s possible” that the consensus No. 1 overall pick, Connor McDavid, will be featured.
