KitchenAid believes in celebrating creativity in the kitchen. The company creates 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.

The purchase of a stand mixer is one that people research. It’s priced at a premium to other category options, and the customization possibilities make it something creative cooks enjoy playing with. As a result, driving traffic to the website is a key goal, as that is the destination where people can explore their colour options and research product quality. For this campaign, the agency’s goal was to demonstrate a lift in visits to the website as a critical step in the purchase decision.

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. During the search for an intrinsically local way to execute this idea, 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 is 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?

The team 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 XML feed. An algorithm used this to provide real-time trafficking instructions to a media partner that matched the colour of the Tower with the closest match among KitchenAid’s thirty-three stand mixer colours.

That digital solution took an existing technology and used it in an innovative way. XML feed is the method used to change creative on digital boards, but typically that is used simply to change creative messaging from one advertiser to another in a digital loop. For KitchenAid, code was written to continuously customize the single KitchenAid feed. Stretching the capabilities of existing media brought the idea to life. The team took a very traditional channel (an out-of-home billboard) and adapted a digital feature to highlight one of the brand’s most-defining attributes – its wide range of colours.

This simple but innovative use of out-of-home technology created a dynamic billboard that simultaneously mimicked the ever-changing colours of the CN Tower’s nighttime lights. In addition to sparking the imaginations of Toronto’s culinary makers with a memorable demonstration of creativity against the nighttime sky, the campaign achieved 350,000 impressions in earned media coverage across multiple publications, and a 78% increase in traffic to stand mixers on the KitchenAid website over the prior month.