Slice

After years of declining ratings, Alliance Atlantis decided to completely revamp the Life Network, a specialty cable channel with programming aimed at women 18 to 49. The plan was to start from scratch with a new name, logo, schedule and target market. Enter Rethink. The agency’s mission was to not only create advertising for the new network but contribute to its mandate, programming and on-air look and feel.

Following extensive interviews, the agency decided to create a women’s channel with attitude, devoted to fun, sexy shows that were pure entertainment – something lacking in the Canadian TV landscape. The goal was to attract a younger, more sophisticated, more urban group of women – with the majority in their 30s – a demographic matching that of the media buyers and planners they were targeting. The net would be devoted to fulfilling guilty viewing pleasures for women. Rethink also recommended the name Slice as an “evolution” from Life, with the tagline, “My vice is Slice.”

The resulting creative played off the net’s status as a vice. So, for example, TV and radio spots were sponsored by the fictional “Coalition of Neglected Vices,” which lobbied women to come back to their old vices. The first phase consisted of a trade launch and advertising campaign in fall 2006. The consumer campaign launched in late February, and included print, cinema and OOH as well as ads in fitness centres and women’s washrooms.

The network went live on March 5, 2007. Within three months it had increased its ratings by 20% versus Life Network ratings in the same period in 2006, and reached the targeted younger audience, according to BBM/NMR numbers.