A six-word story made famous by Ernest Hemingway is the basis of a new multi-media campaign for McGill University running in Toronto.
Ogilvy Montreal has taken his story, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” and created profiles of six celebrated professors or students from McGill University who have their own stories to tell, on the microsite McGill.ca/6words.
The campaign consists of four newspaper ads in The Globe and Mail and Toronto Star, one mural (John St., north of King St.), night projections of the six McGill candidates as well as banner ads.
The night projections will run four nights a week for eight weeks, rotating between several buildings including the Air Canada Centre, St. Lawrence Centre for the Performing Arts and Westin Harbour Castle.
One creative, “Don’t get Quebec politics? Ask me,” profiles Antonia Maioni, director, McGill Institute for the Study of Canada and how she became an expert on Quebec politics.
A second one, “Rwanda survivor becomes human rights warrior,” tells the story of McGill law student Eloge Butera’s arrival in Winnipeg in 2002 after the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
“The six-word campaign idea actually came from McGill,” said Ogilvy creative director Martin Gosselin. “It’s a catchy headline structure, and we took the images of the six people and used a brush-wall effect in black and white to make them look like larger than life figures, like you often see of Che Guevara [on T-shirts and posters.”
The objective of the campaign is to raise awareness of McGill in the Toronto market among alumni, business leaders and prospective students, according to Susan Murley, McGill’s director of strategic communications.
“We have over 16,500 alumni in Toronto alone, not including the GTA (Greater Toronto Area), and we want to remind them that McGill is a vibrant and contemporary university, and to maintain good relations with them which should have a spill over effect when it comes to fundraising.”
Ogilvy also handled the media buy.
