Up north, chilly
reception for a beer joke
Brewer yanks billboards in the Vancouver area
By Toni Fitzgerald
Aug 28, 2009
It appears the one thing that annoys Canadians more than Americans making fun of them is other Canadians making fun of them.
Some folks to the north are in a bunch over an outdoor advertising campaign that makes light of the long-standing tension between the West and the East. (Vancouverites regard Torontonians as terribly uptight; Torontonians see Vancouverites as slackers.)
It started out innocently enough.
Coors Light put up a billboard in Vancouver for its “Colder Than” campaign in which it invites consumers to fill in the rest of the sentence. The idea was to get some laughs.
The billboard, with a picture of a beer being opened, featured this phrase: “Colder than most people from Toronto.”
Folks in Vancouver may have thought it funny. Not so folks in Toronto.
A Torontonian visiting Vancouver caught sight of the sign, snapped a picture and sent it East, where it was picked up by the Toronto papers.
All hell broke loose. A story in the Toronto Star drew 400 comments. A CBC story drew nearly 800 more.
Molson Coors was inundated with calls demanding that it take down the billboard. The beer-maker promptly apologized, saying it was only making light of regional differences and didn’t mean to offend.
The offending creative--30 billboards in all--will be down by the end of this week, a week before the campaign was to end.
There are two lessons here, and one is don’t mess with Toronto.
Earlier this summer, Ikea launched an alternative campaign promoting its new catalog that featured graffiti messages done in chalk on walls and sidewalks.
The campaign ran in several Canadian cities but it was Toronto that led the charge to put a halt to the campaign, arguing that it illegally impinged on public space and, what’s more, was simply unattractive.
The second is that while the art of advertising is often about pushing buttons, media is more and more a two-way street. If people don't like having their buttons pushed, they are all that much quicker to raise a fuss.
And there are so many ways to do it, between Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and other social media sites, not to mention blogs and comment boxes on news sites where readers are invited to sound off.
Torontonians were tipped to the billboards almost as soon as they went up.
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