COC taps ‘We the North’ agency

TORONTO • The Toronto Raptors’ iconic “We the North” campaign generated a whopping 160 million impressions on social media in its launch season alone.

But Vito Piazza didn’t need numbers to know it would be an astronomical success.

“When I went to the first Raptors game right after (its launch), and people were chanting it in the halls, you knew it was going to be something special for sure,” said Piazza, president of Sid Lee Toronto, the ad agency responsible for “We the North.”

Hoping to capture some of that “We the North” magic, the Canadian Olympic Committee has partnered with Sid Lee as its creative agency of record.

The “We the North” campaign would generate half a billion impressions on all media combined in its 2014 launch season, with its pervasive black flag and resonant lyrics — “We are the North Side, a territory all our own. And if that makes us outsiders . . . we’re in.”

The campaign took something that could be a negative — the NBA’s lone outpost in Canada — and turned it into a positive. It was embraced virtually across the country.

The challenge for the COC is promoting athletes that compete largely in the shadows when there are no Olympic Games.

“There’s the bright spotlight during the 17 days (of Olympics), and our goal is to try and extend the window,” said Derek Kent, the COC’s chief marketing officer. “But it’s a challenge. . . how do we extend that window? How do we tell more stories leading up to the Games, more impactfully, and then after the Games in the same vein? And how do we profile these amazing athletes who toil behind the scenes largely anonymously, but so fruitfully for the country?”