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Groupe Média TFO has launched a rebranding campaign through a new animated short film, L'Écho (The Echo), an allegory about education and self-confidence, which addresses the importance of pursuing and believing in your dreams. The film conveys the new brand purpose centered on its commitment to diversity and inclusion, and its role to support students, educators, and parents with high-quality and trustworthy French-language content.

Amidst ever-changing content consumption patterns and digitization, it was a priority for TFO to reshape its brand and declare its purpose as a public media company to better serve the Francophone and Francophile communities. To do so, the brand tasked global Toronto-based creative agency, Juniper Park\TBWA, with creating a new brand architecture, positioning, and purpose that would reflect its progressive educational and cultural values.

With the fundamental belief that the stories that we tell today, will shape our tomorrow, TFO is establishing its new brand purpose and tagline: “enlightening tomorrow” (éclairer demain). This purpose brings directional guidance and inspiration, but also responsibility to develop content that reflects its diverse audience and equips children with the employability skills they will need in an ever-changing world.

“This new affirmation by Groupe Média TFO anchors its public values and educational mandate to finely capture the new challenges that educational public media will have to face to remain relevant to their audiences. By its agility, our renewed visual identity catches up to the speed of the new digital transformation to support and keep up with creativity and innovation. These are two of the essential ingredients to evolve our offer continually, distinctively, and in line with the interests and needs of our primary audiences, namely Francophone and Francophile parents, teachers and children. The Canadian media landscape can therefore count on a broadcaster and aggregator of French-language cultural and educational content that remains in the front line of trends,” says Carole Nkoa, Senior Director, Marketing and Communications at Groupe Média TFO.

To further communicate TFO as a driving force for creativity, innovation, and inclusivity in a knowledge-based economy, Juniper Park\TBWA ideated and worked to develop animated short film L'Écho: an authentic expression of TFO’s educational values of diversity and inclusion, non-judgment, and self-confidence.

The animated short film opens at a traditional Franco-Ontarian home, where a grandmother is seen entering her grandson’s room to tell him a bedtime story about L'Écho; a lesson about the importance of pursuing and believing in your dreams, and how what we consume today can actively affect who we become tomorrow. The story is shown through a flashback from the grandmother’s life, and how she was told she would never go to space. Because the stories we share today will echo for generations to come.

The film is a beautiful allegory of the new brand signature: "enlightening tomorrow”.

L'Écho was produced in collaboration with Canadian animation studio, Wonderlust Media, and Juniper Park\TBWA’s partner agency, Tam-Tam\TBWA, and is running online and on social in teaser forms, as well as in long-form on TFO properties online and on its TV channel. A series of shorter informational videos accompany L'Écho to make audiences discover the new offering of TFO around its new brand architecture: TFO for all, MiniTFO for the little ones, FlipTFO for preteens, and PlusTFO for adults.

"What a time to be working on a project as important and relevant as L'Écho, as now more than ever social media and online content influence the way we talk, think and act, in turn shaping the way we see others and ourselves,” says Neil Walker-Wells, Group Creative Director at Juniper Park\TBWA. “The film is a hard look at this truth, and asks us to be at least aware, if not careful of the information we expose our loved ones to.”

You can watch L'Écho here. A few examples of the shorter inform videos can be viewed here and here.

New Visual Identity and TV Channel Design

Utilizing TFO’s new brand architecture and positioning, Toronto-based design studio Le Parc Design, developed a new visual identity and TV channel design aimed at refreshing the media company for the multi-screen world.

The substantial, multi-brand, multi-platform identity includes 2D and 3D animation for TFO’s on-screen design, as well as static assets for TFO’s several sub-brands; MiniTFO for kids, FlipTFO for pre-teens, PlusTFO (a new brand covering the adult programming including ONFR+ and  CineTFO), IDELLO by TFO (its educational digital platform for elementary schools and families), and the LUV (the cutting edge 3D studio of Groupe Média TFO).

You can check out the new identity here.