Who: Surveillance camera company Vosker, with Montreal agency Cartier for strategy, creative and media, Alt for production (directed by Nicolas Fransolet) and Circonflex for audio.
What: “There, Like You’re There,” a new U.S.-focused campaign for the four-year-old Quebec company as it looks to make inroads south of the border.
When & Where: The eight-week campaign is in market now in North Carolina, running across connected TV and online video with a 30-second spot, supported by out-of-home.
Why: Established in 2018, Victoriaville-based Vosker specializes in solar-powered and cellular-enabled monitoring tech for remote areas where wi-fi might not be available (the ads describe them as “off-grid security cameras”).
Cartier has been working with the company for nearly two years, with an emphasis on corporate branding and lower-funnel digital activations. This represents its first brand marketing effort.
Vosker passed $100 million in sales last year, and is now looking to establish itself in the lucrative U.S. market.
Cartier used Vosker’s Canadian sales data to determine the ideal target of upper middle-class Americans, ideally with a summer home, and identified North Carolina as the ideal market for expansion because it is largely rural, with forests covering more than 57% of the state’s total land area.
How: “[With Vosker] it’s almost like you’re teleporting yourself to where you have your belongings,” said Cartier’s creative director Jean-François DaSylva-LaRue of the creative approach, which plays off research suggesting that American consumers are highly motivated by safety and protecting their belongings.
The 30-second spot shows a man casually sitting on the roof of his house, atop a garage, and perched in a tree. He’s wearing swim shorts and flip-flops, holding a cup of coffee, a towel draped on his shoulders, as he watches the various comings and goings around his property. The perspective then shifts to show that the man is actually sitting beside a pool, watching from his phone using his Vosker cameras, followed by the tagline: “There, like you’re there.”
The towel draped around the actor’s shoulders was “the subject of great thought and analysis,” said Cartier’s creative director Jean-François DaSylva-LaRue. “The guy could not look like it made sense for him to be there…he had to look out of place…but we had to be weird, not disturbing. The towel around the shoulders, combined with the swimming trunks, was just the right amount of weird.”
The actor actually sat on the roof of a house and in a tree about 12 feet off the ground for about an hour on a 10-degree day in October, although the production company did wedge a stepladder under the branch to keep it stable, and the actor was wearing a harness that was edited out in post.
The delivery truck in the spot, meanwhile, was driven by an enthusiastic stunt driver. “He burned so much rubber and kicked out so much gravel that if we had actually used the sound we recorded that morning, it would look like some kind of mad, Evel Knievel driver peeling out of there,” said DaSylva-LaRue.
The concept was extended to billboards strategically placed alongside highways leading into and out of the state’s cottage regions. The billboards show the man from the video spot perched atop the board, accompanied by a product shot and the “There, like you’re there” message.
And we quote: “We’ve become global leaders in the solar-powered, cellular-enabled camera category. After four years of spectacular growth, the time has come to raise awareness by showcasing the extraordinary benefits of our technology.” — Maurice Vaillancourt, vice-president, sales and marketing, Vosker
