Target plays up neighbourly spirit in ads
Montreal features prominently in TV spots as chain seeks to woo Canadians
It seems a daring way to begin a TV ad in a country notorious for its outlaw biker gangs: Dressed in black gloves, leather jacket and jeans, a motorcyclist revs up on a quiet suburban street.
But then the camera gets closer, the biker turns out to be a young woman, her bike is candy-red and has a sidecar and in the sidecar is a dog with a bull’s-eye painted on its face.
On the soundtrack, Félix-award-winning Montreal band Alfa Rococo belts out an electro-pop ditty — “Viendras-tu avec moi?” — and the upbeat message soon becomes clear.
Target, the giant American discount retailer, is coming to Canada next month, and like its bull terrier mascot, Bullseye, it wants to bring you along for the ride.
Target took over most of Hudson Bay Co.’s Zellers retail chain in 2011.
After extensive renovations, it is now starting to open stores in 124 locations across Canada: first in Ontario in March, then Western Canada, then Quebec.
It will open the first of 25 stores in this province starting this fall.
In a folksy, meet-the-neighbours way, the new TV ad (by Toronto director Mark Palansky for kbs+p Canada) takes viewers on a crosscountry drive from Vancouver to Newfoundland and back.
The 60-second spot airs Sunday in French during TVA’s talent show La Voix and again during the Academy Awards. It will also air twice in English during the Oscars in the rest of Canada.
Like a movable feast of tourist clichés, the ad includes brief glimpses of familiar Canadian landmarks, several of them in Montreal, as dog and master ride by.
A chic woman walks her dogs past a bakeshop in Old Montreal. Friends haul a bathtub up some stairs on moving day in Plateau MontRoyal. Kids throw snowballs on Place Jacques Cartier.
The ad also shows a Maritime fishing village, an Atlantic lighthouse, Vancouver’s Olympic Village and the tall cedars and totem poles of that city’s Stanley Park.
Toronto gets some screen time, too: a couple of seconds of people skating in Nathan Phillips Square in front of city hall.
And in each segment there are objects that show Target’s familiar red and white colours — including the Canadian flag.
“This is the first time we’re putting our brand out there in a national way,” Target Canada marketing director Livia Zufferli said Thursday.
“We’ve been so excited to come to Canada and make Canada our new home,” said Zufferli, who grew up in Sudbury, Ont. and lives in Toronto.
The campaign caps a number of local brandings Target has done over the past year to make it seem as Canadian as homegrown competitors like Canadian Tire, Loblaws and Rona.
For instance, it pledged $1 million to Canadian charities, created a $25,000 bursary for young Quebec fashion designers and sponsored a family-friendly winter theme park in Quebec City.
Its ad campaign continues in the same direction: Helping promote the band, Target is making the full threeminute version of the new theme song available free on its website, target.ca.
However, in union-friendly Quebec, Target has also had to cope with a negative counter-campaign: a petition and series of ads on behalf of 10,000 laid-off Zellers employees.
The workers say Target should respect Quebec’s labour code and keep them on staff. The new owners argue they didn’t buy Zellers’ jobs, they only bought the leases to its stores.
Now Target is putting on a happy face, thanks to 60 seconds on TV in the land of its northern neighbour, Canada — with a big accent on neighbour.
The cross-border spirit is there in the video. And it’s there in the music.
To wit, for the English spot, Toronto electro-pop band Dragonette remade the theme song to the U.S. kids show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
Appropriately, its title is a friendly come-on: Won’t You Be My Neighbour?
“That’s what a lot of our engagement has been about: getting to know Canadians from coast to coast,” said Zufferli, revealing the ads from Target’s Montreal offices.
“This TV spot is the anchor to our launch campaign. What we want to convey is, we can’t wait to meet Canadians and be part of their everyday lives.”
That is, just as long as no one’s mistaken for a Canadian outlaw biker.
“Ours is a friendly biker,” Zufferli said with a laugh when asked about the striking image in the ad.
“She only rolls at about 20 kilometres an hour, so I don’t think we’ve caused much trouble.”