In the week immediately following the initiative, sales spiked 29% and were 13% above objectives. Overall sales were 15% above objectives beating prior year’s peak numbers.Our partners were thrilled:“The idea that the media agency came back with was brilliant…It was a showcase ad for our campaign that gave us a significant lift in our sales for Visa” Graham Robertson, AVP of Advertising and Media Strategy, TDBFG“This media agency is a real challenger of convention. We were thrilled we were able to make this original alignment to editorial work for TD.” John Cruickshank, Publisher, The Toronto Star

Innovating in newspaper is a challenge given of how restrictive editorial can be. However, this history only magnifies a fresh idea. We believed the creative concept of being left out or blocked from a deal could be more dramatically illustrated by leveraging the reader’s connection to their newspaper. We broke down the barriers of “church and state” with Canada’s most-read newspaper with our creative media idea, convincing the Toronto Star to partner with us in a single-day execution of their travel section. We worked with the paper to showcase an editorial cover story that fit the exotic locale of the creative, superimposing our advertising over actual editorial. The cover story on South America and Indonesia was seamless with the creative. In addition to integrating our ad into the cover, we dominated Toronto Star’s travel section with three additional pages.

Canadian consumers feel trapped when it comes to their current credit card rewards because they have amassed points only to find it impossible to redeem for the timing/flights they want. The First Class Travel Card enables consumers to take advantage of travel deals anywhere, anytime, to book and redeem with ease. The communication strategy was to demonstrate that consumers who did not have TD’s travel card were barred from many travel experiences, options and sales offers. The First Class Travel Card took an aggressive challenger stance by showing the barriers of other travel reward cards. To illustrate this position, the creative depicted a glass barrier wall, physically keeping consumers out of the travel experiences they wanted. This barrier of a glass wall inspired us. We sought to bring this creative concept to life more dramatically within our major media channel – daily newspapers.