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February 2007 - Strategy Magazine
Creative

Cruise co bows first brand work

by Annette Bourdeau
page 26

You know you need a vacation when your iron starts looking like a cruise ship.

A new campaign for Vancouver-based vacation seller Cruise Ship Centers (CSC) features four different executions depicting everyday items with cruise-like undertones. For example, a line of spilled coffee shaped like the Caribbean Islands, or stacked cups leaning like the Tower of Pisa with the tag "dreaming of a Mediterranean cruise?" All executions drive consumers to the website, cruiseshipcenters.com.

"A lot of people dream of the cruise because it is one of the most luxurious trips you can take, and it takes you to exotic locations," says Craig Redmond, VP/CD at Grey Northwest, explaining the campaign's insight. "The littlest thing can spark [cruise] daydreams...we wanted to plant that seed in their minds using [everyday] inanimate objects."

This is CSC's first time working with an ad agency. "Traditionally, all they had done was DM and full-page newspaper ads with pricing," says Redmond, adding that they relied a lot on using branding from the cruise lines it sells space on, like Princess and Norwegian. "They felt that they needed to uplift the brand a little bit...[and] to establish CSC as a cruise brand itself - a conduit to cruise vacations."

The campaign targets frequent cruisers, who tend to be affluent and retired.

Once every quarter this year, a postcard execution of one of the ads will be mailed to travel agents and CSC's consumer database. Print executions will run in CSC's points club magazine, Seven

Seas Club.

Redmond says the client is considering eventually running the ads in other magazines and as POS and billboards. But, since this is CSC's first time working with an ad agency, "it's baby steps right now."

client: Geraldine Ree, SVP, sales and marketing; John Felice, VP marketing,

Cruise Ship Centers

agency: Grey Northwest

CD/copywriter: Craig Redmond

ACD/AD: David Wong

account supervisor: Mike Leslie

producer: Dennis Isaacson

photographer: Hans Sipma

retouching: Bart Allan

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