Summary
• Coillte Panel Products’ TIME2CHOOSE campaign won the 2008 TTJ Excellence in Marketing Award.
• The campaign was devised by +travis, with the logo from designer Frank Sully.
• It is one of the biggest multi-media, pan-European promotions the timber industry has seen.
TIME2CHOOSE was the culmination of three months’ creative development and media negotiation undertaken for Coillte Panel Products by our team at +travis.
It began with Geoff Rhodes, marketing and business development director of Coillte Panel Products, deciding it was time to promote the environmental credentials of its Medite and SmartPly ranges much more aggressively and emphasise how these brands are differentiated from the competition.
To achieve this, Mr Rhodes challenged us to create one of the most high profile, high impact multi-media campaigns the timber industry had seen. It would need to be pan-European, appear in a wide range of the trade press titles and feature prominently on websites across Europe. It was also to extend into PR, below the line literature, sales presenters and become the underlying theme for other Coillte Panel Products’ marketing activities, ranging from exhibitions to promotional gifts.
The first task was to agree the basis of the campaign’s messaging. Vital for Coillte Panel Products was to position their entire product range as FSC certified. This was especially important for SmartPly where much of its competition is uncertified plywood, which is shipped great distances to the UK and sometimes of uncertain provenance and performance. Both private and public sector buyers are increasingly applying more rigorous corporate social responsibility considerations when sourcing timber, hence they are a key target for the message that SmartPly OSB and Medite MDF are FSC certified and produced locally.
It was also important to reinforce brand specific messaging; for instance that SmartPly is a modern engineered, multi-purpose panel product with a proven track record in timber frame construction throughout Ireland and the UK, or that the breadth of the Medite range enables specifiers to apply the optimal MDF to the job.
Our initial task was to devise a logo that would epitomise the core campaign messaging. For this we turned to top London graphics designer, Frank Sully, winner of two D&AD Pencil Awards (the ad industry’s equivalent of the Oscars). The logo would need to work in harmony with the Coillte Panel Products’ logo, which Mr Sully also designed, and reflect the Irish provenance of Coillte. Most importantly, it had to provide an easy-to-remember, high impact campaign theme. Et voilà, after a few weeks the TIME2CHOOSE logo evolved and was approved as the overarching messaging to deliver synergy across the diverse elements of the campaign.
Advertising then needed to be developed and our creatives, specialists in both offline and online, gathered to work together on the conception of the campaign.
Meantime Farrar Media, a media agency specialising in pan-European corporate campaigns for American, Japanese and European conglomerates, embarked on planning and negotiating with appropriate media for the advertising. Reaching decision makers across Medite’s and SmartPly’s markets required print and offline campaigns in the products’ key markets; Ireland, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.
Discussion took place with media owners across Europe to secure prime advertising positions in magazines and on websites so the campaign’s message achieved standout. And a key discussion was with the TTJ, to see how the campaign message could be communicated with the full authority it warranted. A series of double page spreads in prime positions in the magazine was the outcome, a strategy that was rolled out to other lead titles in each market. Elsewhere page and half page variants of the ads were devised, but always the brief to the media buying team was that the positions had to be appropriate to the gravitas of the Coillte message.
A total of 22 different print titles across four countries were used to take TIME2CHOOSE to specifiers and leading users. Additionally it featured on 17 online sites in banner ads, e-mail ads and via online sponsorships.
At the same time, Coillte Panel Products’ PR agencies briefed journalists about the issues raised by the campaign.
The messaging was also made the focus of Coillte Panel Products’ stands at building industry exhibitions in Ireland, the UK and the Netherlands. It went into ‘virtual space’ too when it became a lead exhibitor at the online exhibition, Sustainability Now, which targets architects and builders concerned about the environmental credentials of products they specify.
TIME2CHOOSE was perhaps the first fully multi-media campaign in the timber industry to run on such a scale across Europe, hence it was thought to be a powerful contender for the TTJ’s 2008 Excellence in Marketing Award. And a bonus of winning the title was that it further raised the profile of Coillte Panel Products and the messaging about SmartPly and Medite.
TIME2CHOOSE remains a key ongoing theme in underlining the differentiated product propositions of Medite and SmartPly. It has been applied to marketing for the latter’s new SiteProtect hoarding panel and will also underpin Medite product launches scheduled for later this year.
