ABOUT

KitchenAid believes in celebrating creativity in the kitchen. The company offers innovative appliances that help unlock the culinary creativity of their highly passionate target.

The KitchenAid stand mixer is an icon of industrial design, coveted by cooks all over the world. With dozens of combinations of colours, bowls and attachments, the stand mixer offers endless possibilities for creative expression. KitchenAid wanted to bring that spirit of creativity to life and showcase the stand mixer’s potential for personalization in a uniquely Torontonian way. To grab attention, we paired the stand mixer with Toronto’s most famous design icon: the CN Tower.

CONCEPT:
The best way to talk about colour isn’t to talk about it – it’s to show it. That’s especially true when you’ve got multiple combinations and hues to inspire people with. As we searched for an intrinsically local way to do that, Toronto’s most famous design icon – the CN Tower – presented a particularly interesting solution.

It’s the star of the local skyline, and every night it’s illuminated with changing colours to reflect city events and sports teams’ successes. What better way to create attention than to leverage this colourful symbol of the city?

EXECUTION:
We set up a webcam that was pointed 24/7 at the CN Tower. During that time, the camera detected its colour every two seconds. Purpose-built code converted the information into an algorithm, then deployed in real-time as an XML feed to our media partner, matching the colour of the Tower with the closest match among KitchenAid’s 33 stand mixer colours.

That digital solution took an existing technology and used it in an innovative way. XML feed is commonly used to change the content on digital boards, and typically to loop different advertising messages on a digital loop. For KitchenAid, code was written to continuously customize every single KitchenAid feed.

We took a very traditional channel (an out-of-home billboard) and stretched its capabilities, adding a digital feature to highlight one of the brand’s most-defining attributes – it’s a wide range of colours.



RESULTS:

Our simple, innovative billboard sparked the imaginations of Toronto’s culinary community and achieved the following:

• 350,000 impressions in earned media coverage across multiple publications
• 78% increase in traffic to stand mixers on the KitchenAid website over the prior month