REVscene Automotive Forum - Toronto residents in a froth over insulting B.C. beer ad

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VANCOUVER -- Showing that there may be indeed be truth in advertising, angry Torontonians have scuppered a B.C. billboard beer ad that poked fun at them for being exceptionally frosty.

On Tuesday, in the face of complaints from about 20 people, Toronto-based Molson Coors pulled a 30-billboard campaign that advertised Coors Light as “colder than most people from Toronto”.

The billboard, which was part of Molson Coors' “Colder than . . .” summer beer campaign, went largely unnoticed by anyone east of the Rockies until a Toronto newspaper carried a complaint from a Toronto resident who saw the ad while on vacation.

Within hours of the story, Molson Coors backtracked and cancelled the campaign after it received complaints from people who thought they offended residents of Canada's largest city. “Our decision was we didn't want to offend anyone,” said spokesman Adam Moffat. “It wasn't meant to be harmful but was supposed to be playful. The insight is there that some people didn't like this.”

It will take about a week to pull down the offending billboards - which were supposed to finish on September 4 after a 16-week run.

The irony is that the advertising campaign was devised by Toronto-based advertising agency Draftfcb and didn't involve anyone in B.C.

But that hasn't stopped an online debate over whether Torontonians are the indeed coldest personalities in the country. In the process, B.C.'s Lotus Land reputation has also taken some hits. More than 350 people had left comments on the Toronto Star site by Tuesday afternoon.

“Whenever I think of BC, I think of a bunch of grass smoking potheads living on welfare. Put that on a billboard in Toronto and we will be accused of some charter of rights and freedoms infraction. Meow,” wrote “ Manganquay” on the Star’s site.

“Lighten up Toronto,” wrote Imran of Mississauga. “Compared to most of the rest of Canada, Toronto IS pretty cold, rude, pushy, and arrogant. It's becoming more like NYC all the time . . . If Vancouver wants to make fun of Toronto, so what? It's healthy rivalry.”

Mike T wrote that anywhere he's toured in Canada he's found helpful people. “In Toronto if any of this happened I would fall down dead - after I was shot, beaten and robbed.”

Even acting Vancouver Mayor Geoff Meggs weighed in. He told The Vancouver Sun he spent much of his youth in Toronto until he finished university.

“I always go to Toronto to chill out, and so should they,” he said.

For the record, Toronto, with a minimum average temperature of 3.5° C, really isn’t the coldest place in Canada. That’s reserved for Eureka, Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, where the average annual temperature is -19.9° C. (Vancouver, by comparison, enjoys a balmy average 6° C)

Moffat said Molson Coors was trying to create a catchy, edgy campaign.

But that is exactly why the beer company shouldn't have caved in and pulled their ads, says Paul Cubbon, a marketing instructor at UBC's Sauder School of Business.

“I actually think they would have gotten more kudos if they'd stuck with them,” he said. “Having decided to run them, I think this was pretty innocuous stuff.”

Cubbon said effective advertising draws attention, in Molson's case, it needed a catchy phrase. “One of the jobs of advertising is to grab attention. Coors light, they may not like to believe it but it's a pretty ordinary beer . . . so they need to stand out and grab attention.”

Cubbon said regional rivalries have always been fair game as long as they aren't over the top. He cited a recent example that failed was Ford Motors' “Drive Like you stole it” campaign last year in Winnipeg, Canada's car theft capital.

The Molson Coors campaign was based on four “Colder than . . . .” ads that played on B.C. themes, including the Toronto hit and “Colder than a souvenir guy in March, 2010”, “Colder than a certain unemployed ranger” and “It's the venti of ice cold beer.” Moffat said the first refers to the end of the 2010 Winter Olympics, the second takes a swipe at the popular Kokanee Beer ranger and the third refers to a large coffee cup produced by Starbucks.

Molson Coors has been collecting up other “Colder than . . . submissions from patrons in an online contest. Some play off of personal relationships, like “colder than your mother-in-law's heart” or regional hits like “ colder than anywhere else if Alberta shuts off the gas.”

But perhaps the one that says it all about how Toronto is feeling picked upon is this one from Toronto Star reader “forwunsicks”:

“Colder than the reception you'll get out West when you tell them where you're from.”

jefflee@vancouversun.com

Read Jeff Lee's Olympic blog at www.vancouversun.com/insidetheolympics

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