When touting the virtues of a vacation destination, it helps to bring a bit of that destination to prospective travelers. That's typically done in gorgeous magazine ads, but a Toronto agency came up with a different approach.
The destination was the ski resort area of Alberta in the northern Rocky Mountains, and to capture the feeling of being on a ski lift, Venture Toronto outfitted benches in subway stations as lift chairs, with skis painted on the floor in front of the benches and a scene of the Rockies behind that showed a lift carrying skiers.
The campaign, for Travel Alberta, the marketing group for the Canadian province, launched last month and ran until the past weekend.
What could be furthest away from a ski slope and fresh air than a bench in a dreary Toronto subway station?
Not much, and that was how the idea came about.
"We're getting record snowfalls and the commutes are awful on a daily basis. We're basically sick of winter. Then it just dawned on us that there are places where winter can actually be fun,” says Jon Mychajlyszyn, creative director at Venture Toronto.
“The contrast between the two environments is what made the ads so appealing.”
The agency says eight iterations of the scene were scattered around the Toronto subway system.
It got lots of media attention, he says, with the campaign covered on various advertising blogs and forums and by newspapers around the country, including the Calgary Herald.
