The NOW Group

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As the weather warms up and days get longer, it’s the perfect time to spring ahead and start planning for summer! And our team has lots of ideas to help your union or non-profit make the most of summer 2024.

One of the “secrets” behind the strength of any organization’s brand is simple. Success starts by making an emotional connection with your audience and winning people’s hearts. It’s as true for unions, non-profits, charities, and public sector organizations as for anything – and anyone – else.

Showing up and showing you care is the first and most important step to building a community of supporters who will hear your message – and help take it further.

How will you win people’s hearts this summer?

You’ve got more platforms and more tactics available for your next campaign than ever before. But this summer, don’t overlook the potential to connect with your audience in one of the friendliest and most neighbourly of ways: By showing up at community events, cultural festivals, art crawls, and all the great summer events that fill the streets of our big cities and small towns all summer long!

Here are just a few ways you can show you care alongside your members—and future supporters—this summer.

Sponsor a Festival

What’s better than going to a party? Try hosting the party! Consider sponsoring one of your community’s favourite summer events. It’s a great way to get noticed and sends a powerful message to every attendee: We share something important in common. Afterall, we both showed up here!

Get Noticed at Street-Level

After months of winter hibernation, spring and summer bring people back onto streets and sidewalks across the country. People are walking more, running more, cycling more—and that creates a great opportunity to get noticed at street-level with fresh billboards, transit shelters, and out-of-home advertising.

And don’t pass up the opportunity for posters, such as wildpostings on busy sidewalks! With striking design and eye-catching messages, you can turn heads and get that all-important second look. It’s also a great way to use gritty, organic, and community-inspired design to build a connection with your audience.

Hop on Transit

Transit ridership continues to rebound across the country, following the pandemic. And there’s good reason to show up on transit this summer. It’s one of the most recognizable public services in people’s lives. And, even if they don’t use transit to get to work, many people will hop on transit to get to summer festivals. Think of the routes people will take and meet people there with eye-catching ads on buses or streetcars—or on your city’s light-rail transit or subway lines.

Pedal Your Message

City bikes offer a fun opportunity for catchy creative. Plus you’re showing your support for cycling infrastructure—and that’s good for everyone’s health and for the environment, too. Plus, we’ve noticed a lot of bonusing on city bike advertising spaces, meaning your creative could stay up longer than you pay for.

Show Up on Screens

Digital ads on mobile devices are a great way to reach people attending a festival or community event. And if people are visiting town for the event, you have an even bigger audience you can reach with a weekend’s worth of digital ads. Plus, digital ads can be an affordable way to dip your toes into festival advertising, without breaking the bank.

Lean In

Want to strike a chord at Folk Fest? Reaching a summer audience is a great opportunity to lean into the event’s theme—with a creative approach that gives people a grin or even a giggle.

Nothing makes your message more memorable than embracing the vibe of the event, wholeheartedly. And our creative team is here to help! We can help you craft a creative approach that shows you love the festival as much as anyone who’s attending. You’re not just there as an advertiser; you’re there as a fan.

The Writing’s on the… Ground?

Think chalk art is just for kids? Think again! Hiring a mural artist to design stunning sidewalk art can be a great way to get noticed by hundreds of festival-goers. And it helps convey an important message about your union or non-profit’s personality: You’re fun, down-to-earth, and not afraid to get your hands dirty.

Feed People!

We all know it. The best way to a person’s heart is… food! From ice cream trucks to lemonade stands, there’s no shortage of great ways to give people something good to eat – and make a memorable connection. Just be prepared to be popular! (Hint: don’t run out.)

Light It Up

Got an evening art crawl or late-night jazz performances in your community? Light up the night with light projections after dark. For several hours each evening, you can be turning heads and getting noticed in an entirely unexpected way.

Excited about summer? Want to explore ideas for how you can show up in your own community? Give us a call, or send us an email. We’d love to help!

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Happy holidays! Every year, all year, our team keeps our eyes on ads seen on screens around the world. And when the holidays roll around, it’s time to celebrate— and share—some of the most memorable ones we’ve watched throughout the year.

When you see a great ad, you know it. It’s got the power to cut through the noise. Grab attention. Give you a laugh. Push you to tears. And, of course, the best ads have the power to change how you feel or even how you think.

Here are just 7 of the memorable ads we saw in 2023 from around the world.

Far Enough, Vote Yes – Voice Referendum Australia

Cheeky. Humorous. And effective. This ad cuts through voters’ excuses surrounding the Voice Referendum, urging Australians to just google it. “You need to tell people about that. The googling thing. They should know about that.”

Forward Faster – UN Global Compact

This is a two-minute video, but it starts with what every great ad needs: a brilliant hook, right off the top, that compels viewers to just keep watching.

Proudly the Second Best – IKEA

We aren’t a corporate ad agency and there aren’t a lot of ads selling products that we really love. But this series of ads from IKEA is smart. It proudly positions IKEA products as only the second best; the connection between parents and their kids will always be better. Talk about knowing your audience—and speaking directly to it. Kudos.

Deconstructed Closets – United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)

The UN Population Fund worked with one of the biggest ad agencies in Argentina to turn old closets into Pride murals, transforming symbols of oppression and prejudice into new artworks of celebration and solidarity.

The Polite Bouncer – Icelandair

Every year, our annual list of memorable ads seems to feature something we’ve seen – and loved – from Scandinavian advertising. (Last year’s OutHorse Your Email to Iceland’s Horses still makes us giggle with delight). This year, we saw Icelandair launch a social-first campaign with cute, on-brand ads like this:

Forgotten Places – John Fetterman’s Senate Campaign

Okay, okay, this ad isn’t from 2023! It’s from 2022. But we watched it again – and loved it again – so it deserves an honourable mention in this year’s list. It’s a beautiful ad featuring Fetterman’s central campaign message: “We can’t leave anyone behind.”

Vote Social, Vote SP – Dutch Socialist Party

A fun and upbeat get-out-the-vote ad from the Socialist Party in the Netherlands that delivers a simple message: Make sure you leave the polling station feeling good!

Enjoying the creative inspiration? Check out some of our favourites from previous years here and here.

From everyone at The NOW Group, happy holidays and happy new year!

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Every parent knows. It’s a struggle to find childcare. And once you’ve got it, the daily routine can be hectic.

Rushing for drop-off. Running late for pick-up. Juggling schedules. And always racing against the clock. It’s a daily struggle for busy families, adding stress and worry that parents—and kids—just don’t need.

What if there was a better way to deliver safe, affordable, and accessible childcare for thousands of BC families?

Now, there is!

CUPE BC has been campaigning for public childcare for years. In their latest digital campaign, Seamless Childcare Now, they’re continuing the fight. And our team is proud to partner with BC’s largest union to help make life better for parents.

While BC is making progress to improve public childcare and reduce costs for families, there’s more to do. And seamless childcare in public schools is the perfect next step.

By putting empty classrooms to use and delivering before- and after-school childcare inside all of BC’s public schools, the province can create thousands of new spaces for school-aged childcare without building a single new facility. And BC’s education support workers are trained, qualified, and ready to deliver the before- and after-school childcare that families need.

It’s a practical solution. And for parents, it couldn’t be easier. One drop-off, one pick-up, and the confidence of knowing that your kids are getting the care they need, at school, all day long.

Our brand new digital ads take a creative approach to engaging BC’s parents, showing that empty classrooms are one of BC’s greatest untapped resources. Instead of leaving parents to worry about making complicated childcare arrangements, seamless childcare is the simple solution that could make life so much easier for families—and deliver the safe, affordable, and accessible childcare we all need for our kids.

At The NOW Group, we love building fresh and engaging digital campaigns that connect with parents—and help build support for the public services that make life better for people. And every day, we work with our clients to support and improve public education for millions of kids across Canada.

Want to talk about new tools for your next digital campaign? Reach out here or give us a call. Our team is ready to help.

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At The NOW Group, we create winning campaigns for good causes. Our work is about making life better for people, building stronger communities, and strengthening the public services we all count on.

It’s never about collecting awards. But, when award season arrives, it’s a nice surprise to be recognized by our peers in the advertising industry—for good work that makes a real impact.

And this week, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve won 5 awards at the Summit Creative Awards, an international advertising competition featuring entries from 28 countries.

Plus, for the fourth year in a row, The NOW Group has been named a Top Agency in recognition of our team’s creative excellence.

But we couldn’t do it alone.

All our clients are working to improve life for Canadians. And we’re honoured to work with you.

Here’s a look at our award-winning campaigns.

Canadian Cancer Society – About Life

Silver Award for Health / Medicine Marketing

Everyone in Canada has a right to access palliative care. But for too many people and their loved ones, it’s not there when they need it.

We worked with the Canadian Cancer Society to create a national, bilingual campaign to raise awareness of the benefits of palliative care—and call for better access for all.

Our team travelled to meet Canadians who have lived experience of palliative care. We listened to their stories and filmed them at home and in their communities. The result is About Life, an ad featuring the voices and stories of real people and their loved ones, and complemented by four longer form videos, focusing on each person’s experiences.

At its heart, the campaign helps to address one of the biggest misconceptions about palliative care: It’s not about death.

It’s about life—and the ability to focus on what matters, when it matters most.

Check out the campaign at cancer.ca/palliativecare.

uOttawa Faculty of Medicine – Ottawa’s Academic Health Network

Silver Award for Health / Medicine Video

From unlocking the secrets of genetics to finding novel therapies for rare diseases, new discoveries are occurring every day inside Ottawa’s hospitals and health faculties. And these discoveries are improving care for patients and families around the world.

That’s a story worth sharing.

In partnership with the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Medicine—Canada’s first and largest bilingual medical faculty—we worked to help raise awareness of Ottawa’s Academic Health Network. The challenge was clear. Each of Ottawa’s hospitals and health faculties has a unique identity, its own character, and strong brand awareness with its key audiences. Each institution is known for its unique expertise.

But what isn’t widely known is the power of their partnership.

Our job was to elevate them, together. To build awareness amongst medical researchers about Ottawa’s Academic Health Network, we needed to show the connection and collaboration amongst these institutions – and the unique opportunities this cooperation creates for conducting world-leading health research in Ottawa. Read more about the project here.

National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE) – Brand Refresh

Silver Award for Logo Redesign

There’s so much we love about NUPGE! It’s a unique family of unions that serves as the national voice for its provincial components, representing 425,000 members who deliver public services of every kind.

It’s a leader in the fight to improve working conditions and protect public services for Canadians. And by uniting provincial unions, NUPGE speaks with a truly unique national perspective.

NUPGE’s previous logo was over 20 years old and feeling a bit dated. The logo wasn’t fully capturing the real strengths of this “union of unions” or reflecting the warmth of an organization that brings people together.

To help change that, we set out on a collaborative branding process to strengthen and modernize NUPGE’s look. We listened and learned from NUPGE’s team, conducted extensive consultations and discovery sessions together, and worked in partnership to deliver the refreshed brand tools that the union needs.

Our goal? To help NUPGE look its best. Read more here.

CUPE 503 – In Our Communities. For Our Communities

Silver Award for Public Service Campaign

CUPE 503 represents almost 10,000 members across Eastern Ontario, delivering public services that help strengthen our communities.

Together, we worked to give CUPE 503 a fresh new look, new tagline, and new campaign—that showcases the vital work members do every day. 

The new ads showcase the beauty of a community where strong and reliable public services make it possible to learn, grow, play, and care for each other. And the new tagline says it all: CUPE 503 members are in our communities, for our communities.

See more of the campaign and rebrand here. 

CUPE 503 – In our communities. For our communities.

Ontario NDP – Election 2022

Gold Award for Political Marketing

As the lead ad agency for the Ontario NDP in the 2022 election campaign, we crafted a wide range of creative content including three signature television ads.

A lot of voters love to hate political advertising. But these ads are different. Believe stood out for its unscripted authenticity and grit. It was down-to-earth and elevated the real voices of workers. Hard Work built on that message, showing that the NDP is committed to fixing health care instead of cutting it, fixing seniors’ care instead of neglecting it, and bringing down the costs families face.

And Ping Pong? Well, it’s just a great ad! Filmed with 2,000 orange ping pong balls, it used humour and a smart metaphor to help turn pessimism and cynicism into hope and optimism. And it transformed the other parties’ strength—their long history of governing in Ontario—into their biggest weakness.

Ontario’s NDP – Ping Pong

Congratulations to all our clients and production partners across Canada. We can’t wait to see what we do next, together!