Molson Coors has two new campaigns in market. With many beer drinkers still unable to enjoy a pint of Miller Lite in bars, the brand has created a limited-edition line of $25-candles called “Bar Smells,” enabling consumers to smell their favourite watering hole while drinking Miller Lite safely at home.
The three candles are:
- Dive Bar: Musk, Tobacco, Pine, Yeast
- Game Day Bar: Salted Peanut, Jalapeno, Cracked Leather
- Beer Garden: Green Moss, Warm Pretzel, Cracked Wood, Sunburn
(Not our thing, but we definitely prefer these smelly candles to these smelly candles.) All proceeds from sales of the candles go to support the hospitality industry.
Meanwhile, the brewer has also launched Coors Seltzer in Canada “with a mission” to protect the country’s fresh water. For each 12-pack sold, Molson Coors is pledging to “restore 1,000 litres of Canadian waters.”
TV ads (here and here) adapted from the U.S. playfully present Coors Seltzer drinkers as “volunteers” doing their part to help Canada’s waters. “Coors Seltzer tastes good and does good,” says the narrator. Coors Seltzer is in market now, in Black Cherry, Mango, Lemon Lime, and Grapefruit flavours.
Juniper Park\TBWA has added two associate creative director teams: Gira Moin and Sasha Newton join from Mosaic, while Derek Silveira and Jason Lee were most recently at Zulu Alpha Kilo.
“These new hires are a continuation of our intentional goal of building our creative team with diversity, seniority, and top talent, to connect with our diverse North American clients’ audiences. Gira, Sasha, Derek, and Jason represent all of the above, and it’s a pleasure to have them come aboard as we build further momentum,” says Graham Lang, chief creative officer at Juniper Park\TBWA.
Other recent hires in the creative department include art director John Ricciardella from Rethink, and copywriter Dylan Verwey from Zulu Alpha Kilo.
Corus’s social and digital agency so.da just announced 21 new additions to the roster of talent creating content for Corus’s lifestyle media brands HGTV, Food Network, Slice and Complex Canada.
“Establishing a new roster of young, diverse and expert creators for our lifestyle brands has allowed us to reinvent our editorial strategy and develop dynamic original short-form content,” said Dervla Kelly, senior vice-president, marketing and so.da. “Not only do the creators bring authenticity and influence to the content, our brands themselves bring tremendous authority and influence, along with providing a contextually relevant and brand-safe environment for advertisers to integrate into.”
Creators work with the so.da team to produce content series on a range of advertiser friendly topics including healthy eating, baking therapy, home improvements and DIYs to beauty, fashion, sex and relationships.
Toronto Raptors centre Chris Boucher has joined the Puma team. After being named MVP of the NBA’s developmental league in the 2018-2019 season, the Montreal-born Boucher was added to the Raptors roster for the run to the NBA championship in June 2019. He emerged as a crucial player for the Raptors last season and is having a standout year this season.
Boucher could also feature prominently for Team Canada at the Tokyo Olympics later this summer.
Boucher will appear in Puma campaigns for both the basketball and lifestyle sides of the business. Puma also said Boucher will take part in its grassroots basketball programming in Toronto and in his hometown of Montreal. Puma has been actively expanding its connections to basketball and aside from Boucher has added rising stars like LaMelo Ball, Kyle Kuzma and another Canadian, RJ Barrett.
Naked Creative Consultancy just helped launch the Million Gardens Movement, which aims to encourage millions of Americans to grow their own food as a way to address issues of food insecurity. Naked worked on all of the UX, UI and web design with Troon Technologies, which built the site.
Million Gardens Movement is an open community resource offering how-to garden advice for first-time growers to expert gardeners. The project was developed for Big Green and Modern Farmer.
“Food has always been central to our culture at Naked—so much so that we produced our own cookbook in 2019—and so to play a key role in creating awareness and a deeper understanding and connection to home-grown, sustainable goodness is a real honour,” said Laura Mahon, director of content, production and digital at Naked.
Celebrities including Harrison Ford, Zooey Deschanel, Salma Hayek, and Jonathan Scott (of the Property Brothers), are among those helping to raise awareness of the effort.
“The Million Gardens Movement is about reconnecting us to our roots, to real food, and to a path to a sustainable, healthy lifestyle,” said Kimbal Musk, executive chairman of Big Green (and brother of Elon).
Dentsu has officially relaunched its “digital-first media agency” iProspect in Canada, led by Dan Kalinski as CEO with Ronnie Malewski overseeing iProspect East and Ruth Murray managing iProspect West. Dentsu created the new iPropsect by folding its traditional media agency brand Vizeum into the performance and digitally focused iProspect.
According to Dentsu, the agency fuses brand building, strategic planning, business intelligence, marketing activation, and performance optimization.
“Bringing together the best of Vizeum’s expertise in consumer planning with iProspect’s agility in performance media, ensures we’re setting our people and our partners up for success in navigating a fast-evolving media landscape,” said Murray in a release.
“We are a new force in the industry, one that draws on decades of expertise carefully brought together to create an agile, scaled, digital- first organization built for the future and delivering today,” said Amanda Morrissey, global president of iProspect, in a release. “In fact, the only thing that has stayed the same is the name, but even that looks different.”
Vancouver-based Jelly Digital Marketing & PR has introduced two new scholarships to its Jelly Academy training program. One scholarship is reserved for a female applicant, and the other is for someone from the BIPOC community.
The Jelly Academy course offers training in social media, digital ads, public relations and content marketing, and is intended for people with limited experience in digital marketing, or smaller companies without a marketing team.
“This is our small way of ensuring that financials aren’t a hindrance to opportunity,” said Sarah Clark, partner at Jelly Digital Marketing & PR. “We look forward to welcoming a more diverse community to our academy.”
