What Do You Think: Are CTV’s “Believe CTV News” Billboards Cheesy Self Promotion?

UPDATED 02/02/10 – COMMENTS RECEIVED -By Mike Archer. Driving from Abbotsford to Mission this week I noticed the “Believe CTV News” billboard ad and it made me wonder why I should … believe CTV News I mean. It also made me think of VANOC’s over zealous attempts to protect the integrity of the Olympics, its logo, image and name.

There have been two notable examples of VANOC going overboard in its role of protecting the Olympics logo, image and name.

One of CTV's 'believe CTV News' billboards

VANOC seems to have backed off in the case of the Olympia and appears to be backing down due to the bad publicity over its ‘protection’ of the flame debacle.

CTV News was among the Vancouver media that reported on VANOC’s silliness.

How is it then, that CTV News is allowed to take the ‘believe’ theme it is using to inspire Canadians in support of our athletes and morph it into a Stalinesque series of billboards in the Lower Mainland telling us all to ‘Believe CTV News?”

CTV has given itself credit for its “Believe” series of TV ads featuring Canadian athletes with voice over from Canadian actor Donald Sutherland, to whit:

“Canadians will “fall in love” with the personalities of their 2010 Olympic athletes as they learn more about their drive, their passion and their commitment to sport, says the president of Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium.”

When the original announcement for the campaign was made on Sports Business Daily much was made of the way the series would inspire Canadians by focusing on our athletes.

“The campaign, titled “Believe,” is “designed to make household names of Canada’s elite competitive athletes” and features narration from actor Donald Sutherland and music composed by Howard Shore. The “most ambitious aspect of the first phase” of the campaign is a pair of 60-second commercials.

“The “first two of a dozen athlete-focused ads to hit the airwaves tell of the stories, hopes and dreams of downhill skier Jan Hudec and skeleton racer Melissa Hollingsworth.” The athletes in the campaign “talk about the central role belief plays in sports, and end each segment looking directly into the camera and asking, ‘Do you believe?’”

If CTV’s billboard ads simply said ‘Believe’ and then, at an appropriate distance from the Olympic theme, showed their logo, the ads would not be open to question. As it stands the billboards appear to be a deliberate, albeit very dated and poorly executed, attempt to slip a hidden message into the campaign.

It strains credulity to imagine that the ‘Believe’ campaign somehow turned innocently into a ‘Believe CTV News’ campaign. CTV appears to have taken something that started out as admirable and turned it into cheesy self promotion.

Perhaps VANOC should exercise as much care in how its official sponsors use or misuse the image and integrity of the Winter Olympics as it does when attacking innocent small business people.
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