Hippos and Humour in Telus ad Campaign

Just when we were tiring of those cute animals in the Telus campaigns, their ad agency, Taxi, rose to the occasion and creatively took it up a level using humour and hippos to create the unexpected to get attention. Their new Hippo campaign, launched in early March, features two hippos, Ghost and Polita - a follow-up to their recent Hippo ad from the Telus holiday season campaign. Hazina the hippopotamus first appeared in a DDB created spot for Telus in a 2005 holiday ad campaign in Western Canada that used the 1953 "I Want A Hippopotamus For Christmas," song.

A little background – Telus first began their animal-focused ad campaign in 1999 with an eye-catching red-eyed-bright-green tree frog jumping out of a jar. This campaign still continues today using a consistently simple approach of a white background as the backdrop to a cute animals and the slogan, “The future is friendly.” TV spots use popular songs as memorable center-pieces of the ads, giving them stopping-power that gets attention.

The March 2010 Telus Hippo campaign features two humorous spots that will have you chuckling to their bold combination of music and unusual images.  A large and awkward hippo portrays the Telus network as fast, nimble and extensive. The first humorous spot spoofs the hare and the tortoise fable, replacing the tortoise with a hippopotamus to showcase the network’s large size, also using a cute bunny rather than a hare!  It uses the music “Speedy Gonzales,” by Pat Boone to ad a humorous touch and get attention. The second spot focuses on two hippos swimming in a water hole to the light-hearted tune "Splish Splash" by Mina Mazzini and uses clever editing to reveal the hippos are actually swimming in the face of a cell phone. The Telus spots use repurposed footage from the original 2005 Christmas spot and new scenes that include the new hippos-stars who are the brother and mother of the original Hazina who lives in a zoo is British Columbia. For all the animal lovers, Telus donates money to the Zoo for the use of the animals in their commercials and donated $10 thousand dollars for each of the first two spots.

Below you can see the two latest Hippo ads from Telus as well as their repurposed 2005 spot for 2009 – enjoy the hippos and humour!

Telus “Fast” spot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2ypCK0QpR0

Telus “Best” spot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Dhq-gkyCQs

Hippo for Christmas ad

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjStRjpiedU

Launchfire - Creative Online Promotions

Online promotions are often the name of the game with viewers going to microsites or landing pages to interact with brands. Have you seen this latest fun, interactive, online game for Telus created by Launchfire? Here it is - a super, simple, and interactive game that engages consumers! Each month between March and November 2009 Telus are giving away nine $1,000 Staples’ gift certificates - topped off by a single grand prize of a $20,000 Staples’ gift certificate in November. Have some fun by going to http://playthegame.telus.com/ where simple brainage-type games are scattered between subtle user focused ads matching players’ login profiles. This online game cleverly delivers advertising messages with accuracy while also building an email database of users.

Launchfire’s creativity and consumer insights leaves them in the enviable position of having a roster of high profile clients from around the world with names such as Dell, Yahoo, Microsoft, P & G, the NFL, and Nestle etc. They specialize in contests, sweepstakes, advergames, user-generated content and viral marketing. To see the extent of their creativity check out this advergame created for the Canadian market in 2005 for Dell’s new MP3 player. This game lets players test their music knowledge and enter into contests – lots of fun and meaningful results -the promotion generated over 60 thousand consumer profiles, 1.6 million in-game ads and an outstanding average on-site user time of 90 minutes! Check out Dell’s music promotion at http://www.launchfire.com/advergame/index.html.

I hear we should expect some exciting new things from Launchfire next week - http://www.launchfire.com/. I’ll keep you “posted”!