Sometimes they're selling you more than just coffee
When the Olympics ended, an NBC correspondent named Brian Williams wrote a thank-you note to Vancouver on his blog. The reason I mention it is, his sixth point was:
[Thank you for] ...your unique TV commercials -- for companies like Tim Hortons -- which made us laugh and cry.
Ah, yes. Tim Horton's. Canadian identity in a coffee cup. I actually remember when that company was primarily a chain of donut shops, and we didn't have one in my hometown so any trip to an exotic location like Moncton or Bathurst (for a dog show) was an occasion to purchase a box of donuts.
Now Timmy's is so pervasive that at the end of my first of library school, in 1998, a bunch of us took a little car trip around the province with a Chinese classmate who was getting ready to graduate and go home. She spent the first half hour counting Tim Horton's.
Tim's is responsible for some great television ads, two of which are embedded behind the cut.
Welcome home
Fathers and sons
The first ad is probably the one Brian Williams referred to in his blog. Coincidentally, this morning on my f'list I ran into a discussion related to this, only from the other direction: what it feels like when people imply "you're not one of us, you don't belong."
And the point of the Timmy's ads is that they're not really selling coffee. They're selling an idea about Canada, and who is a Canadian.
The featured player, Sidney Crosby, apparently was in the TimBits hockey program as a little kid. I find it very interesting to look at all these ads together: the message I take away is that Tim's is as Canadian as hockey... and Nice Nigerian-Born Family and Grumpy Chinese-Born Grandpa are just as Canadian as Timmy's. The company is obviously positioning its products to be part of these moments of pure Canadiana, but the moments that were chosen are significant too.
Back when Pierre Trudeau died, I signed the online memorial book set up by the federal government. Reading through it, I encountered message after message from people who came to Canada during the sixties or seventies, when Trudeau was Prime Minister, because they had received the impression that Trudeau's vision of Canada was of a country that would accept all citizens, they just had to choose to be Canadian.
It's not quite so pure as that, but the vision I see in these Timmy's ads is one Trudeau would have recognized. It's an interesting choice for a corporation with a profile as high as Tim Horton's--sentimentality is common coin in advertising, but these ads also make assumptions about the kind of sentimentality that will work on Canadian viewers. And I kind of like the assumptions.
[Thank you for] ...your unique TV commercials -- for companies like Tim Hortons -- which made us laugh and cry.
Ah, yes. Tim Horton's. Canadian identity in a coffee cup. I actually remember when that company was primarily a chain of donut shops, and we didn't have one in my hometown so any trip to an exotic location like Moncton or Bathurst (for a dog show) was an occasion to purchase a box of donuts.
Now Timmy's is so pervasive that at the end of my first of library school, in 1998, a bunch of us took a little car trip around the province with a Chinese classmate who was getting ready to graduate and go home. She spent the first half hour counting Tim Horton's.
Tim's is responsible for some great television ads, two of which are embedded behind the cut.
Welcome home
Click to viewFathers and sons
The first ad is probably the one Brian Williams referred to in his blog. Coincidentally, this morning on my f'list I ran into a discussion related to this, only from the other direction: what it feels like when people imply "you're not one of us, you don't belong."
And the point of the Timmy's ads is that they're not really selling coffee. They're selling an idea about Canada, and who is a Canadian.
The featured player, Sidney Crosby, apparently was in the TimBits hockey program as a little kid. I find it very interesting to look at all these ads together: the message I take away is that Tim's is as Canadian as hockey... and Nice Nigerian-Born Family and Grumpy Chinese-Born Grandpa are just as Canadian as Timmy's. The company is obviously positioning its products to be part of these moments of pure Canadiana, but the moments that were chosen are significant too.
Back when Pierre Trudeau died, I signed the online memorial book set up by the federal government. Reading through it, I encountered message after message from people who came to Canada during the sixties or seventies, when Trudeau was Prime Minister, because they had received the impression that Trudeau's vision of Canada was of a country that would accept all citizens, they just had to choose to be Canadian.
It's not quite so pure as that, but the vision I see in these Timmy's ads is one Trudeau would have recognized. It's an interesting choice for a corporation with a profile as high as Tim Horton's--sentimentality is common coin in advertising, but these ads also make assumptions about the kind of sentimentality that will work on Canadian viewers. And I kind of like the assumptions.