The cbc’s in-house commercial department, Event and Sales Promotion, has made the step up from exclusively doing low-budget video spots with a glossy image campaign for Air Canada.

When the airline needed a series of high-end commercial spots linking the airline with the Olympics, the job was given to esp, which had previously done only promotional and commercial spots for the client.

The esp department has been operating for about a year now, and has produced around 40 spots for various clients. esp offers cbc and CBC Newsworld clients one-stop creative and production shopping for print and television advertising.

Janet Walters, manager of event and sales promotion at cbc, says the brunt of the esp department’s television spot production is for clients running contests or promotions to correlate with holidays and special events like the Olympics.

Such was the case with a series of spots for Via Rail that ran on the main network in celebration of Canada Day. Other clients include the Canadian Tourism Commission, Labatt and Nivea Optimale, for which a series of spots was created where the company aligned itself as a sponsor of women’s events and with holidays like Mother’s Day.

The esp department has about 15 staff members including graphic designers, writers, producers and special event and network specialists. Production, including directing and post on certain projects, has been contracted out to freelancers.

The most high-end example of esp’s in-house work was the series of four 60-second spots for Air Canada which ran on an eight-week media buy during the cbc’s broadcast of Molson Hockey Night in Canada. Working as the creative arm to Air Canada’s Montreal ad agency Marketel, esp creative director John Belbeck created the concept for the Olympic-themed ads in addition to scripting and directing.

Shot on 16mm film, the spots were edited at Toronto’s Optix post house, because cbc post equipment was unavailable.

‘With the recent Air Canada ads, there was no promotion or contest, just straight image creative announcing the airline’s involvement with the Olympics,’ says Belbeck. ‘We put the creative together from ground level.’

Not all of esp’s commercials are as sophisticated as the Air Canada spots. Walters says the department can produce more economical spots for clients, some of whom have never used television advertising in the past.

‘Some clients are so afraid of tv because they think it’s so prohibitive to create a 30-second spot, and it can be if your objectives are so grand that you’re spending several hundreds of thousands of dollars on a commercial,’ says Walters. ‘We’re not in that business, but we can create spots.’

Both Walters and Belbeck say the esp department is not designed or intended to compete with agencies or commercial production houses. ‘Yes, the cbc is in the business of producing commercials,’ says Belbeck. ‘But we don’t have a rep or solicit work. If we did we’d be swamped. We just work with existing clients.’