Tag Archives: Union Station

14 Dec

The 30-foot Christmas tree in Toronto’s Union Station is wrapped in 3,100 LED lights which flashes in green, red, white and blue. These aren’t just your regular Christmas tree lights though, these lights represent Christmas chatter online.

When the holiday is being talked about in the news, the tree’s green lights flash. White represents when Christmas is a topic of conversation on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. When the red lights are on, it means blogs and forums are are flooded with holiday posts, and the blue lights represent Christmas talk on the tree’s very own homepage Christmas Spirit Tree.

Advertising agency, Tribal DDB, are the people behind the Christmas Spirit Tree and created the idea for Canadian Tire. And it sure did work, because the popular store was trending on Twitter earlier in the week.

The tree picks up on words like Santa, merry, holiday, gift, time, and year. When these words are posted online, they help to power the Union Station light show. Sitting on top of a unique server, the tree has the help of another advertising agency, Sysomos, to filter through comments, posts and messages. The coloured lights get brighter, depending on the number of messages being posted in Canada. Underneath the tree is an interactive map which shows where in the country the online messages are originating.

“We wanted to be different. We thought, how could we do it with a social feed?” said Rosie Riolina-Serpa, assistant vice-president of digital & gift card for Canadian Tire. “I think the tree just gives everyone a good feeling.”

The Christmas Spirit Tree will be on display at Union Station in Toronto from now until December 26th from 6am to midnight. If you are unable to visit the tree in person, you can check out a live stream on the tree’s website, or on screen at Dundas Square in Toronto.

-Kiwi Commons

Pandora Station

13 Apr

From Marketing Magazine: Avatar’s Big Blue Aliens Invade Union Station by Jeremy Lloyd

The thousands of commuters leaving Toronto from busy Union Station last night may have felt as though they travelled further than they planned. Much of the bus and train station’s busiest concourse is covered in images of Pandora, the alien world of James Cameron’s 3D blockbuster Avatar.

The four-week station domination, which went up Monday to announce the film’s April 22 release on DVD and Blu Ray, is the largest domination package ever sold by IMA Outdoor, which owns the media at Union Station.

According to Stephanie Jacobs, marketing manager for Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, the package includes never-before-sold portions of the environment thanks to extended negotiations with Go Transit, which sells tickets from the concourse floor.

Aside from large floor and ceiling coverings, pillar wraps, video screens and other more traditional elements of such executions, Twentieth Century Fox created a large-scale model of the film’s Home Tree environment.

IMA also set aside part of the lower concourse as a “Pandora zone,” where eight-foot-tall cut outs of movie characters stand against a back-lit mural.

“If you look up you will see us, if you look down you will see us,” said Jacobs.

Union Station was chosen for its high foot traffic. “It’s located in the heart of downtown, and in proximity to the Air Canada Centre. It allowed us to do something really visible,” Jacobs said. “We needed a high-impact execution that lives up to what the movie did theatrically.”

Zenith Optimedia handled the buy. Creative elements were made jointly by Fox’s in-house team and Markham, Ont.’s Timbol Design Communications, which worked on the 2005 DVD launch campaign of the last Star Wars trilogy.

Sherlock Holmes in Toronto

5 Jan

While Avatar was the most anticipated film of the holidays, you wouldn’t know it by living in Toronto. Everywhere you looked in December, the city was plastered in advertising for Warner Brothers’ Sherlock Holmes.

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Warner Brothers Toronto Twitter

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