The Wait Is Over

Despite the ever-increasing interest in live webstream coverage, television still rules the roost in many curling countries. And that means scads of creative spots are set to arrive.

Curling Canada is first out of the gate with their first ticket-selling advertisements since 2019. The Wait Is Over series gets straight to the point, picking up from where COVID-19 stopped curling—and the world—in its tracks.

In a second spot, the arena janitor discovers another frozen-in-time fan applying face paint in the washroom.

“Fans who love watching live curling, like all live sports, were frozen in time 20 months ago,” said Curling Canada’s Nolan Thiessen. “We were 48 hours from first stone at the World Women’s when everything shut down. So we had some fun with that where we said fans have literally been frozen waiting for curling to come back. Cobwebs, beards growing. And now the wait is over ... curling’s back.” 

The adverts were produced by Curling Canada’s integrated creative agency Cossette.

“We had a great time working on these spots for Curling Canada. We worked with Kiddo Films and they did a fantastic job of making sure everyone on set was following the proper COVID protocols,” said Scott Schneider, Creative Director at Cossette. 

“We filmed at multiple locations including an arena in New Westminster and a flower shop on Main Street in Vancouver, which was a smaller space and limited the number of people that could be on set. As you can imagine the arena was much larger so that gave us more space and made filming easier.”

Cossette also produced a participation-geared “Discover Curling” spot, which takes place at the aforementioned flower shop, entitled You Should Be Curling.

“We had to figure out who we wanted to attract,” said Thiessen. “People who have tried curling before but it was perhaps 10 years ago, or folks who have never tried it but have slid something across a table and joked they were curling—like that Steph Curry video of him using the shammy on an NBA court, right?"

“We decided on both of those groups, as well as our regulars, the diehard curling fans. We wanted to make it fun and exciting, but include a call to action—you should be curling.”

The previous round of pre-pandemic Cossette commercials starred commentator/host “Doug” who was paired with various athletes to promote Curling Canada’s Season of Champions events. Kevin Koe starred in one, and the notoriously expressionless skip did precisely what was asked of him.

Those spots were tagged “Curling Fans Get Closer” which appears to have been discontinued. The new dual tags are “Curling’s Back” and “Experience The Action Live.”

Another earlier advert celebrated wheelchair curling, and served as a recruitment tool to attract more participants to the discipline.