The Toronto Tool Library made its debut as an advertiser on Monday with its first major ad campaign.
The campaign, crafted by Fuse Marketing Group, promotes the breadth of tools the non-profit organization has available for loan with a set of three comedic spots that show characters taking their use of high-powered tools a little too far.
The first of the three ads to be promoted by the Toronto Tool Library is a spot about a father giving his son a bath with a pressure washer.
Another shows a child’s birthday party where guests are handed a nail gun to shoot at a balloon dart board, while the third shows an over-zealous baker using a massive torch to bake a crème brûlée.
Patrick Weir, senior-vice president of creative and innovation at Fuse, said the ads were designed to show how the Toronto Tool Library has a wide array of tools, but the agency wanted to punch up the message with humour to better connect with the organization’s 19- to 30-year-old demographic.
“Tools for any occasion, that’s a pretty simple concept,” Weir said. “We wanted to get something that would impact as video. And there’s nothing more impactful than a 10-year-old girl holding a nail gun,” he joked.
“It was really about creating something to cut through with that demo. As we all know, with social the things you see on there are kind of crazy. We wanted something that was fun, but didn’t ever go too over-the-top, which is why there’s a little theatre of the mind at the end [of every spot].”
The campaign also includes posters which will be put up as wild postings in the neighbourhoods surrounding the Toronto Tool Library’s two locations.
The Toronto Tool Library is a community space and registered non-profit that offers consumers rentals on tools with pricing based on an annual membership (depending on access, memberships run from $50 to $100 per year.). According to Weir, Fuse first connected with the group when one of its associate creative directors, Dima Zelikman, moved into a new home and used the tool library to finish his renovations.
Fuse delivered the creative pro bono, while the Toronto Tool Library is funding its media buy. Ryan Dyment, executive director of the Institute for a Resource-Based Economy (the organization that runs the tool library), said in a release that working with the agency helped it create a campaign it otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford.
“As a small non-profit organization, we could not possibly afford to do this kind of campaign ourselves, so it was great to partner with the open-minded and creative team at Fuse,” Dyment said. “Punchy and laughable, the campaign hits the right tone with our target audience and we look forward to bringing in new members who are looking to share tools rather than own them.”
The ads are running for four weeks with a media buy handled in-house by the Toronto Tool Library.
