Back when we lived in Toronto, the daily walk to my office job involved walking across Union Station, where every week I was bombarded with direct promotional items from big brand companies: bags of Uncle Ben’s Rice, Coke Zero cans, chewing gum, Kleenex, Shampoo & Conditioner sample, bottles of Frank’s Hot Sauce, Aero and Hersey’ chocolate bars, Kellogg’s Fibre Bar, Red Bull & various juice boxes, Colgate toothpaste, Fresh Pasta from Pizza Hut, free prescription glasses (for real: I still wear them everyday!), a rose from CityTV’s The Bachelor and the famous Avocado from Avocados Mexico that made it to this blog (read more here). Here in Ottawa, not so much luck in getting direct promotion stuff! In spite of working right downtown, the only direct promotion I came across before today was around the time Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland was released. People dressed in giant playing cards were hanging around Metcalfe and Albert Street, distributing playing cards deck in nice little tin boxes to people who could answer trivia questions about Alice. I was thrilled, got the question right and proudly brought home the pack of cards… All that to say that today, when I saw a giant blue balloon in the sky and people dressed as air hostess everywhere I felt like I was once again living in a big city and was very excited to see what that was all about. Sadly though, it wasn’t as extraordinary as I expected it to be. Nothing eatable (first disappointment) and nothing useful to me (second disappointment) as unfortunately we don’t have any trip planned to New York, Boston or Chicago. Indeed, the air hostesses were simply distributing cards announcing a Porter promotion: 50% off any flight booked before September 7. Past the initial disappointment, I actually looked at the card that was handed in to me and realized that, as always, Porter had paid a special attention to design and create once again an attractive piece featuring its now famous raccoon.
(Short parentheses here: does someone know why Porter choose a raccoon as their company’s icon? Does that animal have any flying or traveling particularities that I’m unaware of? On this website we can see more branding that the London/Zurich/NYC/Hong Kong/Tokyo-based firm Winkreative created for Porter, but nowhere do they mention the story behind Mr.Porter. As cute as I think it is, I’m still struggling to understand why the airline uses that particular rodent… End of parentheses.)
Back to the card, it’s printed on nice stock and uses a lot of red, which is pretty unusual for Porter who normally primarily uses blue and white in its materials. I guess the stage curtains would not have had the same impact if they hadn’t been red – especially on the Globe and Mail website because, as you can see below, the “Porter party” continued on the web!
It was a well targeted campaign: the main clientele of Porter (executives who travels frequently for business purposes) received the card this morning on their way to work, probably didn’t pay much attention to it and dropped it in their briefcase, got to the office, turned on their computer and visited one of Canada’s most read newspaper website, saw the Porter ads everywhere and remembered the cards they were handed in earlier. Then, if all goes according to the airline’s plan, they gave the card to their secretary/admin assistant for them to book their next flight(s) right away using the discount code… that is of course if they’re well-trained execs wanting to save their business some money! Quite a straightforward marketing approach…
However, I have to mention that there was an annoying little mistake on the back of the card: a bullet is missing between Thunder Bay and Windsor. Not a big deal, probably a very few detailed-oriented people (like me!) noticed it but since I’m sure that Porter paid a premium price to get this card printed you’d expected typos like this to get caught before production. In spite of that oversight, the flyer (no pun intended) will still make it to my collection of pretty printed things to keep.
Vick @ Yellow Car Design
