These athletes look incredible. That was the simple thought that stuck in our heads soon after we began working with the 2009 ICF Canoe Sprint World Championships.

Dartmouth, Nova Scotia is the location for this year’s competition. This is a huge event. An international competition of top-calibre athleticism: The world’s best paddlers will be gathering in Halifax this summer for an incredible weekend. Our client needed a complete branding campaign to build excitement not just among the sports fans of Halifax, but also the non-sports fans, not to mention sponsors. They needed a campaign that would intrigue anyone with a pulse. Playing off of the high-performance, toned athletes was soon agreed on as a great way to accomplish this.

So, we decided to wrap a concept around the athletes themselves, by comparing them to high-performance automobiles. The photography, the copy, the overall look, is borrowed from the auto industry. Thereby the sheer athleticism and power of these competitors is celebrated. The inherent promise to the consumer is this will be a weekend of high energy, unparalleled performance, and a whole lot of eye candy.

The campaign is still to launch in its full form, but the website and other online initiatives (Facebook, Twitter …) are now live. Added soon will be newspaper, outdoor, transit, radio, video, and non-traditional tactics like ambient. Stay tuned.

A graduate of both the Film & Television and Media Copywriting programs at Toronto's Humber College, and a multi-award-winning copywriter, Brad Dykema has worked at advertising agencies across the country and beyond. Brad's career has taken him on a journey from his native Toronto's Communique Group to Vancouver's high-profile PJDDB, to Amsterdam, where he joined the ground-breaking StrawberryFrog, and then back to Canada. Throughout, Brad's work has consistently been recognized for getting clients noticed and achieving their objectives. Since settling in Halifax, he has established himself as one of the region's most award-winning copywriters, collecting dozens of Ice Awards for work done at trampoline, Extreme and Colour. The extensive list of clients Brad has worked on includes notables such as Nova Scotia Tourism, New Brunswick Government, Microsoft, Sun-Rype, Alexander Keith's, McDonald's, Telus, Credit Suisse, Atlantic Lottery, EastLink, Workers' Compensation Board, and Aliant. His work has been recognized with an impressive list of awards from Marketing, Bessies, New York Festivals, ICE Awards, Extra Awards, Advertising and Design, London International Advertising Awards, Archive Magazine, Applied Arts and more.