B.C.’s Wild Horse Canyon wine galloped into Ontario this month with a new print, outdoor, and online campaign by Taxi Vancouver.
Wild Horse Canyon wine, from the Artisan Wine Company, owes its unique flavour to a blend of grapes from B.C., Washington and California, says Kim Kapoor, vice-president of marketing.
The campaign consists of around 30 different executions using various pictograms—simple pictures representing a word or an idea—and is running only in Ontario. “It’s branded without screaming brand and that’s what a lot of consumers are looking for,” says Kapoor.
There is an air of authenticity to the brand story because it was inspired by the wild horses that still roam freely in all three regions where the grapes are grown as well as the pictograms, or cave art, discovered there.
Kapoor says the wine targets young, adventurous people looking to discover new things.
The label, which has the distinctive copper horse, has a lot to do with the wine’s success, she adds. “The label is designed to be quite memorable and upscale. It’s easy to remember and it also speaks a lot to quality.”
The ads also carefully target different audiences. For example, a tattoo execution is running in the hipster-chic Queen West area of Toronto, while another targets theatre-goers and a third targets gays and lesbians, she says.
“We are really trying to communicate and be in sync with our audience in a clever way—you need to think a little bit with these ads, but it’s all done in a way that still manages to maintain the classiness of the brand itself,” says Kapoor.
Artisan is also running a retail promotion at 100 LCBO stores and launched a separate website, alwaysagoodsign.ca, where visitors can make their own picto-mail using some of the 50 symbols created for the ad campaign. The tag line for the campaign is “Always a Good Sign.”
Wild Horse debuted in the Vancouver market about a year ago, but rather than advertising, Artisan went with sponsoring events and in-store sampling. “The brand did do very well without advertising in Vancouver,” says Kapoor.
