The template for the massive new content deal between Canadian Tire Corporation (CTC) and TSN was loosely conceived in a phone call CTC’s senior vice-president, Duncan Fulton, made to TSN president Stewart Johnston on the eve of the Toronto Raptors’ game seven showdown with the Brooklyn Nets.
CTC’s youth charity, Jumpstart, which works to make sports accessible to low-income families, was sending 15 youngsters to the game, and Fulton thought documenting the experience would make great content for CTC’s various social media channels.
“The level of relationship between the top of the house at Canadian Tire and the top of the house at TSN is extraordinarily good,” said Fulton, whose official title is SVP, communications for CTC and chief marketing officer for its FGL Sports and Mark’s divisions.
“Our visions just gel perfectly, which explains why – on a Saturday morning – Stewart Johnston and I are talking to each other while I’m at Starbucks and he’s with his kids at a sports event.”
Johnston quickly agreed to Fulton’s proposal, and TSN crews subsequently filmed the youngsters arriving at Maple Leaf Square (rechristened Jurassic Park for the NBA playoffs), interacting with on-air personality Cabbie Richards, and cheering on the Raps in their losing effort.
That footage was eventually edited down into a two-minute video that appeared on TSN’s BarDown.com channel, as well as CTC’s social media channels, including Facebook and YouTube.
That concept, writ large, is the basis of the new multi-year, multimillion-dollar content deal between the two companies that was announced Monday. It has its basis in CTC’s belief that sports is essential to the company as both a business and brand builder, and is transforming the company culture.
“Given the journey that we’ve been taking in sport [which includes the $771-million purchase of Forzani Group Limited, operator of the Sport Chek and National Sports brands, in 2011, and its $85-million purchase of Pro Hockey Life Sporting Goods in 2012], it struck us a number of months ago that we were under-represented as an advertiser and marketer on sports channels,” explained Fulton.
While simple TV advertising may have been the basis for the initial conversation, Fulton said it quickly became apparent that there were opportunities in the content space.
“As we got into the conversation, it was like every meeting started to talk about the costs on a 30-second TV spot,” he said. “[But] so many of our customers are online in all of these different channels, and we’re scrambling to hire enough people to produce enough content to fill them.”
Content may not necessarily be king for CTC, but it plays a crucial role in the company’s day-to-day operations. Its Sport Chek store in the West Edmonton Mall, for example, has more than 800 screens and an estimated 240 content channels—ranging from in-store signage to digitally enhanced merchandise displays—that require a full-time staff of nine people to fill with content.
“It’s a tsunami of content,” said Fulton, who added that CTC has no plans to scale back its internal content teams as a result of the deal.
“We believe that you never outsource a strategic differentiator, and content, digital and technology are all strategic differentiators,” he said. “But tethering ourselves to TSN, with access to the kinds of properties it has, and access to quality production facilities and talent, is one of the smartest things we can do right now.”
The deal is also reciprocal in nature, said Fulton, since TSN gets to align itself with one of Canada’s biggest retailers, with 1,700 locations coast to coast and an estimated one million customer transactions each day.
Fulton described the deal as a watershed moment in CTC’s illustrious marketing history, and a signpost for the company’s future endeavours. “We will never do another media deal where the first chapter isn’t content,” he said.
While both companies noted that the deal provides CTC with access to premium sports properties, including the IIHF World Junior Championships and the Grey Cup, it has multiple permutations. Fulton said it could include everything from a column by a TSN personality in the weekly Canadian Tire flyer to an employee-of-the-month message delivered by one of its hosts.
CTC is currently attempting to put similar content deals in place with other media companies, including Rogers Media, which operates TSN’s biggest competitor, Sportsnet, and kicks off a 12-year rights deal with the NHL this fall.
Those discussions, which Fulton said are similar in nature to the TSN deal, are going “very well,” he said. CTC is also involved in content discussions with The Weather Network, Facebook and Google.
CTC has said it will fund the “multimillion” -dollar initiative by pulling from other areas of its ad spend which is more than $100 million. Fulton said the company worked closely with its media agency, Touché, led by president Karine Courtemanche, to determine how to best structure the deal.
“I don’t think people will notice a radical departure of our brands from any particular channel; we’re fortunate to be large enough that you can usually shift things around to make things like that,” he said. “We’re not just pouring millions and millions of net new dollars against sports; we’re also being responsible re-allocating what we have.
“We knew we were not spending enough money generally against the sports audience, so we had to make tradeoffs,” he added. “No one area will be decimated by this, but it might mean you have a little less advertising on the Space channel or HGTV and a little bit more on TSN.”
