Future Shop is about to launch its 2010 illustration-intensive back-to-school campaign with an expanded media buy.
The national campaign is set to go live in English and French tomorrow with television, print, cinema pre-roll, online and in-store elements that turn various back-to-school products (phones, computers and music devices) into cartoonish illustrations. Radio ads will round out the media buy.
Cossette, marking its third back-to-school season as Future Shop’s agency, also created a new tag line for this and future marketing campaigns: “Exciting stuff.”
“They wanted to re-energize the company from a marketing perspective,” said Marta Cutler, Cossette’s vice-present and convergent creative director. “They did a lot of research and found that people see Future Shop as an adult toy store. They love going and getting their hands on gadgets. They get really excited about it.”
Cossette’s Optimum and Rocket XL public relations divisions are handling PR for the campaign as well, which includes social media elements on Facebook and Twitter. In addition, visitors to Project.Img.Nation.com can enter a contest for school tech prizes by using an online art interface to mimic the campaign’s art style, which is based on that of popular street artist Blu.
“The [media buy] is bigger for sure compared to last year,” said Nikki Hellyer, director of marketing for Future Shop. “Back-to-school is our second-biggest selling season of the entire year. We wanted to reinvest this year.”
“There’ a lot of opportunity with new technologies, smart phones for example, that there’s a really good story to tell,” Hellyer said.
Cossette is now developing a campaign for the holiday shopping season that will carry forward much of the “re-energized” branding of the back-to-school work.
