A massive campaign promoting the launch of Alliance Atlantis’ Slice channel is teasing women with the promise of guilty pleasure — using all the gadgets in the marketer’s toolbox with online, on-air and out-of-home components hitting cities including Halifax, Ottawa, Toronto, London, Winnipeg, Calgary and Vancouver.

The channel, formerly known as Life Network, is set to relaunch on March 5, aimed at women 18-49.

A heavy PR component, run by Montreal-based National PR, will leverage the appeal of program hosts such as Kelly Osbourne and Ellie Tesher.

On-air, Alliance Atlantis is promoting the launch with heavy use of U.S. ad avails, nestings on 10 other specialty channels and a free preview on Bell ExpressVu. The spots, conceived and created by Vancouver-based Rethink, suggest that women everywhere are about to neglect their usual vices in favor of watching Slice.

The print and OOH executions take a confessional tone to newspapers, showing grainy mid-sentence mugshots of women with sassy quotes in subtitle style. ‘I watch Slice because my real-life friends are so boring. And, I hope, illiterate,’ says one. Another reads, ‘I watch Slice, but don’t tell anyone. This isn’t going in an ad is it?’

The creative will dominate subways and urban dailies, including the Toronto Star, the subway daily 24 Hours in Edmonton and Calgary, and Metro in Toronto and Calgary.

The OOH rollout includes a collaboration between Alliance Atlantis and Pattison Outdoor that marks the first use of lenticular technology (motion changing creative in high-traffic malls) by a Canadian advertiser.

The online ad campaign, developed by BBDO Toronto’s Proximity Interactive team, gives Canadian women surfing female-skewed sites the chance to get a glimpse into other women’s secret vices. An interactive luxury loft lets web browsers click on various windows to access the guilty secrets and view snippets of Slice shows.

Slice’s launch will carry the tone of the ad campaign into regular programming features, such as viewer advisories with cheeky voiceovers such as: ‘This program has some coarse language. You know how kids are these days. Viewer discretion is advised;’ and ‘This program has mature subject matter and coarse language. Two out of three ain’t bad. Viewer discretion is advised.’

From Media in Canada