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The Canadian Film Centre has launched a campaign to support the 2008 Worldwide Short Film Festival.
The campaign includes television, print, online and out-of-home creative designed by Toronto’s Doug Agency, with executions playing off of the notion that the average consumer has an increasingly limited attention span.
One TV spot, for example, shows a man on a park bench who becomes alarmed as he watches a trail of oil left by a passing scooter set ablaze by a woman dropping a match, but is distracted from the imminent explosion by a leaf that floats in front of him. The spot ends with the tag line, “Shorter is better” and a super that throws to the festival website.
Barry Patterson, director of marketing and communications for the CFC, believes the creative concept will resonate with viewers who have come to appreciate short-form content.
“It really speaks to how people are entertaining themselves,” says Patterson of the campaign. “They’re watching videos on YouTube, they’re viewing things on mobile phones—we know that they’re seeing bite-sized snippets of entertainment. And our programs can provide great entertainment value for people with limited time who like variety.”
Doug Robinson, chief creative officer at Doug Agency says the latest effort improves upon the WSFF campaigns his shop created the past two years.
“This year’s [creative] is based on the stuff that’s really going on in the world,” says Robinson.
In addition to the traditional creative, the CFC has also placed miniature versions of newspaper boxes, branded with the WSFF logo, on Toronto streets.
The campaign includes a grassroots initiative in which selected individuals receive phone calls from “telemarketers” whose scripts play on the attention-span theme. While Patterson gives few details about the calls, he says the telemarketing concept is in keeping with the tone of the campaign and the WSFF in general.
“We’ve always had a humorous tone to our work, and we liked the idea of being tongue-in-cheek and clever with consumers,” he says.
The campaign launched earlier this week. The festival runs June 10-15 in Toronto.
