Industrial Alliance Insurance and Financial Services Inc. and IA Clarington Investments Inc. have launched a joint advertising initiative to build awareness of their brands in Canada, the companies said Thursday.

The campaign is based on the elephant in the Industrial Alliance and IA Clarington logo. The elephant was incorporated into the logo in 1992 during Industrial Alliance’s centennial anniversary. Since then, it has become a well-known symbol of the company.

“We chose the elephant because of the many distinctive qualities one associates with this species: strength, longevity, loyalty, sense of family and sense of responsibility,” said Jacques Carrière, VP of investor relations for Industrial Alliance.

Industrial Alliance has steadily built its presence across Canada through more than 25 acquisitions, including North West Life, National Life, Seaboard Life, Co-operators Mutual Funds, FundEX, Clarington Funds and, most recently, the Vancity Inhance family of socially responsible investment funds.

“Even though Industrial Alliance is the fourth largest life and health insurance company in Canada and IA Clarington is a $7.6 billion mutual fund company — and both have strong brand recognition with distributors — neither has strong name recognition with the general public,” says Brett Rathbone, AVP, marketing and communications at IA Clarington.

“Our aim is to become a household name in the financial services industry in Canada. We thought that if we could create a context for the elephant, linking it more directly to the services we provide, we could make a greater impact.”

The new campaign uses compelling photographs of elephants in the wild, and each ad relates a characteristic of elephants to a particular product line of IA and IA Clarington, such as life insurance, investments, critical illness insurance, group insurance and group pensions, RRSPs and RESPs.

The campaign kicked off with national newspaper ads, extensive out-of-home advertising and specific trade publications, and it will run throughout winter and spring and then again in the fall. A campaign microsite was created at www.apartneryoucantrust.ca.

IE