Two stories from the Ubyssey, UBC's student newspaper:
Canadian Tire’s new ad stars the T-Bird football team
Behind the scenes of Canadian Tire’s Thunderbirds adCanadian Tire’s new ad stars the T-Bird football team
By: Jack Hauen May 2, 2015, 4:57pm PDT
Canadian Tire commercials have always had a flair of Canadiana to them — as well they should, the country is in the name. Their newest commercial uses members of the UBC football team to show just how durable a polyurethane garden hose is.
The ad has familiar faces like Terrell and Marcus Davis, Callum Williamson, A. J. Blackwell and Dallas Yassinsky (among others) stomping the hose with cleats, bending it in ice baths and stretching it as far as it’ll go, which should be pretty good exposure for the team. We just hope rivals don’t use it to trash talk us in the future — I can hear the “hosers” jokes already.
English version of ad:Behind the scenes of Canadian Tire’s Thunderbirds ad
By: Koby Michaels May 14, 2015, 5:55pm PDT
Canadian Tire’s latest TV ad campaign features UBC’s Thunderbird Stadium and Thunderbird football stars Terrell and Marcus Davis, Callum Williamson, A. J. Blackwell, Dallas Yassinsky and others.
How did UBC land such cinematic gold?
“It was originally approached as a venue rental,” said Kavie Toor, the Facilities and Business Development Director for UBC’s Athletics and Recreation department.
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Canadian Tire was looking to rent the stadium to shoot their garden hose ad and contacted UBC’s football program. But the opportunity was too good to pass up on and Canadian Tire and UBC athletics entered into talk to partner for the TV spot.
Toor said that the ad, along with other Thunderbird partnerships like the Whitecaps and BC Lions, are the result of long negotiation processes and countless hours of behind the scenes work.
“It was an interesting experience,” said Callum Williamson, an offensive linesman for the Thunderbirds and an actor in the ad. “I figured that the directors would know exactly how they wanted the commercial to look before we even showed up but that wasn’t really the case. About 80 per cent of our time was used for rehearsing.”
Williamson also said everything had to be shot twice, as there was a separate ad produced in French.
Toor and the university had other interests beyond it being an interesting experience for the players. Canadian Tire paid the athletics department and the athletes for the facility and their time, but UBC would not disclose the exact amount and Canadian Tire did not respond to a request for an interview. Toor estimated that the TV spot had over $1.5 million in advertising value for the university and the football program.
Beyond the monetary value, Toor said the partnership is part of a much larger effort by the university and the athletic’s department to grow UBC sports. Be it with Canadian Tire, the Vancouver Whitecaps or the BC Lions, UBC is looking to expand the Thunderbirds as a brand. Toor said these partnerships are a sign of things to come.
“Nothing to report on yet but of course we continue to be active on a number of fronts,” said Toor of upcoming partnerships. “There is stuff coming…. We are at the initial stages of exploring other partnerships opportunities and expect that sometime later this year.”
So stay tuned.
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French version:
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Good on UBC and the Thunderbirds for getting run like this, but consider what a coup it would have been for the Lions had they been the ones featured in this ad and getting the exposure. Since being uploaded less than a month ago on CT's youtube channel, the two videos have together garnered about 320k views, 265k for the English version alone. Looking through the video listings page on their channel, I'd say that ranked by views it's in the top 5% of all the videos they've uploaded in the last two years (something like 800 of them, a lot of which are under 10k and even 1k views). By comparison, the Lions' own Shuffle video that went viral in September 2013, over a year and a half ago, is currently around 81k views, most of which came in the first week or two after upload.
There's been a whisper or two on this board that the Whitecaps are doing a better overall marketing job than the Lions but here it seems even the T-Birds have won at least this particular battle.
I don't know whether they've already tried to do so, but perhaps the Lions ought to consider pitching their Surrey practice facility and players as a backdrop for advertisers to film similar promotions. Maybe a Tim Horton's ad? Just thinking out loud here as they're already a sponsor (I know there was an ad a couple years ago with Al Wilson and Angus Reid — did it ever run anywhere besides on the BCP video board during games?).
Now, I'm not saying an ad like this would suddenly vault the Lions to the forefront of the public consciousness and send everyone scrambling to snap up season tickets — and I'm not sure this particular ad will even do much for attendance at T-Bird Stadium considering that they don't even play for several months, by which time the buzz from this ad will have likely cooled — but surely some good would come from the increased visibility, and then you have to build on that. As the second article above notes, UBC is working on leveraging this ad into further partnership opportunities.