New Canucks commercial light on ambition
Buzzwords gloss over the fact this team has been to playoffs just once in 8 years
New — as Don Draper taught us at the end of the first season of Mad Men — is the most important idea in advertising.
“It creates an itch,” he explained in a pitch to Kodak executives for the Carousel slide projector.
New can be as simple as the words you choose.
Kodak came to Draper with their new slide projector, suggesting it be called the wheel.
But the wheel is old, they acknowledged. And so Draper countered with making the wheel into something new.
He urged a newer word: carousel Still an old word, but representing a fancier, prettier version of the boring old wheel.
This week the Vancouver Canucks introduced a new TV commercial — or supposedly two weeks ago, according to one suspiciously pro-team anonymous Twitter account, though where it was being screened isn't clear. It is apparently part of their current Next Season Starts Now campaign, centred on the ideas of structure, habits and setting a standard.
These have been the buzzwords uttered by the Canucks in recent months, though curiously they didn't use “predictable,” which both coach Rick Tocchet — who plays a starring role in the new ad — and his players have said more than once. The idea is that they needed to be predictable to each other, that there's no energy wasted wondering what they're going to do in any given moment.
“Every day, we're trying to become a team that we want to be,” Tocchet is quoted in the spot.
That's a good vibe, but the word is a hard one to sell.
The Canucks may want to play predictable hockey, but cynical fans and commentators would see room to make mocking comparisons: “Oh the Canucks, predictably, came up short.”
The coach is new, the energy they're trying to sell may be new, the buzzwords may be new, but the reality is this is just an old message: you've got to work hard now to be ready later.
They've tried this before. “We are relentless,” they declared five years ago.
“We don't run half a trail. We don't skate half a shift,” they declared six years ago.
For the Canucks “new” is a challenge. They're a well established brand. They've also struggled to deliver entertaining hockey on a consistent basis over the past year. It's been eight years since fans saw a home playoff game.
But a mention of playoffs doesn't come up once in the video. And that's curious, since general manager Patrik Allvin said that is next season's goal.
This TV spot is airing during the current Stanley Cup Playoffs, where we know the Canucks would like to be.
What's the purpose of the buzzwords? “We want to be better,” is the message. But why leave the purpose hanging in the wind? Is there a fear of setting out an ambitious goal?
The team failed time and again over the past eight years because too often the plan was simply one of hope. The new management team says they have a plan — why not put that up front?
Since that series versus Calgary in 2015, the Canucks have played 617 regular-season games, 309 of them at home. They've won just 143 of those, the fifth-fewest in the NHL.
If you're not winning, you can try to sell the experience. But that clearly hasn't been enough, given how rarely Rogers Arena has been even close to a sellout in that time.
New was Draper's hook in his pitch to the Kodak executives, but the idea that really sold his concept was nostalgia. Nostalgia is more powerful than new, he urged. Nostalgia is a longing for home, or an idealized memory of home.
The Canucks have some young stars who claim to have a plan and could lead that way.
Fans want to remember the good times. They want to believe that these new players could revive the old glories. Leaning into old glories is risky, of course, but there's also an ambition — which carries far more weight than leaning on some buzzwords.
Draper notes that he understood nostalgia to also mean “the pain from an old wound.”
“A twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone,” he said.
There's risk in remembering how good things were. But wanting to be there again risks a revisit of past inadequacies.
But if you can't face up to where you've erred, how are you going to fix things going forward?