Parody ad campaign lampoons Nunavut food prices

Here’s a slide from a parody Instagram account set up for the fictitious Way North Foods grocery store. “Hungry? We hope so. Because the price on boneless pork butt shoulders are sky high!”

They’ve done protests, petitions and Facebook groups. Now they’re using what might be the most effective weapon of them all: ridicule.

Nunavut’s Feeding My Family movement has teamed up with copywriter Christopher Lihou and art director Brad Connell, who work for a Calgary advertising and design agency called WAX Partnership, to produce a side-splitting parody ad campaign that lampoons Nunavut’s brutal food prices.

It’s based on a fictitious retailer called Way North Foods: “Here at Way North Foods we’re committed to bringing you the high prices you just won’t find anywhere else!”

Each commercial opens with a cheesy jingle, followed by shots of grinning actors — each wearing Way North T-shirts and aprons — flogging fake products from inside a real grocery store.

“Really high prices for everyday items/Mmm. It’s the Way North way.”

The spoof videos take the well-worn techniques of retail advertising and turn them on their head with puns, visual jokes and clever writing.

“We did lots of research on YouTube of that kind of genre, those classic deal-of-the-week videos of local small market grocery store ads, and all the little clichés that they do and just tried to boil it down,” art director Connell said.

“We wanted to make that parody seem authentic and good because really what we wanted to do was create something that was very relatable to southern Canadians. People are very familiar with opening up their newspaper and seeing big screaming prices…”

The combined effect is a dark parody that drips with black humour — because the prices are real.

“We have price hikes on all your favourites. Like getting squeezed? Two litres of orange juice, just $26.29!”

In another segment, an animated graphic pops up in the top left corner of the screen showing a price label that reads “WAS $6.49.”

That figure is covered by a yellow X-mark and replaced with a new label that reads “NOW $38.99.”

At the same time, a chirpy voiceover says: “Here’s a wake-up call! Gourmet coffee, just $38.99!”

After the outro jingle, the videos get serious.

A piece of text over a light gray background pops up. “Way North Foods isn’t real.”

The next frame reads, “But for families in Nunavut, its prices are.”

A third frame displays the social media hashtag #EndThePriceHike, followed by the campaign website: endthepricehike.ca.

There’s also a parody Way North Instagram account that features real photos taken inside North West Co. stores.

About a year ago, Lihou and Connell read an online article on Buzzfeed about high food prices in Nunavut, and eventually decided to donate their time and creative talent to build a free advocacy campaign for Feeding My Family and Helping our Northern Neigbours.

“Leesee [Leesee Papatsie of Feeding My Family] was the first person we reached out to and she was fantastic… After that we brainstormed and came up with some ideas and then presented those ideas to Leesee and she really liked them,” Lihou said.

Lihou and Connell rounded up a volunteer team of advertising and media professionals from the Calgary area and persuaded them to donate time and energy to the project.

An audio house in Calgary called Six Degrees agreed to write and record the jingle, composed and sung by Andrea Wettstein, a Six Degrees employee who also did many of the voiceovers.

And a Calgary production house called Joe Media supplied a director and camera operator, and a studio, while a local grocery store let them come in to shoot video for a day during business hours.

The only non-volunteer was a local actor they hired to play an avuncular store manager. They paid him a small fee, the only hard cost they incurred.

All other contributors to the project are volunteers from Wax Partnership, Six Degrees and Joe Media, all of whom gave their time for free. Most of the actors are Wax Partnership employees.

“That’s why it took about a year to get together. We kind of worked on it when we had spare time, here and there, chipping away at it, and then went hard at in December to get it finished,” Connell said.

They launched the videos on Dec. 28, posting them on the Feeding My Family and Helping my Northern Neighbours Facebook groups.

They’ve also posted them on a website called endthepricehike.ca, which contains a “how to help” section that invites viewers to share the videos on Twitter and Facebook.

The #EndThePriceHike site includes buttons that take people to the www.feedingnunavut.com site, maintained by Taye Newman, a web developer who runs her own media company in Oakville, Ont.

The www.feedingnunavut.com helps people make cash donations to northern food banks and contribute to a letter-writing campaign aimed at members of Parliament.

The ad industry blog, Ad Week, has already heaped praise on the project, saying it “brilliantly skewers northern Canada’s surreal food prices.”