Pallian Creative

If you’ve been following my tweets during the past 3 weeks, you would’ve noticed a few mentions and re-tweets from a very special character named @gastonreport. Gaston Tartarin is a french reporter from Paris who visited Vancouver during the 2010 Winter Olympics. He produced 10 videos from Vancouver, all of which are embedded below for your viewing pleasure. And that’s where this story begins.

You see, Gaston Tartarin is not real. I made him up.

It all started on an early February morning. We were in our Yaletown office - the sun was shining warm and it felt like spring. I debated setting up my table on the deck, just to be outside and enjoy the city while Vancouver was prepping itself to host the biggest sporting event in its history. I knew I had to get out and I needed an excuse… and it was in that precise moment, that Gaston was born. Well, he wasn’t called Gaston then… he came in the form of Nico.

A little back story - Nico Alary is a very talented Visual Designer who’s been with Pallian Creative since last summer. He also happens to be a very talented actor and photographer. Nico used to produce a weekly show called SexLab and it was pure comedy genius. I knew working with Nico on a video project was inevitable… so when I mentioned the Gaston idea to him, he jumped on it. Not only is Nico french in real life, he’s got that rare natural comedic talent that very few of us has. Nico’s first assignment was to get a costume - which he secured within the hour by going to the neighborhood Salvation Army store… his signature wool jacket, tie and hat cost less than $30. We did a photo shoot that evening and Gaston Tartarin was officially born.

Now came the hard part - marketing. Like all good ideas, Gaston Report had to get his word out. We set up a twitter and facebook account for Gaston, even before we had a website, to start letting Vancouver know that an unusual french reporter was hitting the town. I knew mass following people on twitter wasn’t going to help… instead we started targeting local high profile bloggers who had a large following on twitter. One of the first people that came in mind was Miss604… she’s been blogging about Vancouver for a few years now and always manages to be on top of the latest happenings. So when she tweeted that she was attending the opening of the Swiss House, we knew we had our first episode. Armed with a Canon 7D and a Flip HD, we headed out to Granville Island where the Swiss House for the Olympics was setup and luckily found Miss604 blogging. A quick introduction and a tweet later, we were in her blog post with a happy photo. We edited our first episode that weekend and were officially ready to start rocking the following Monday, five days before the opening ceremony.

Over the next few days, we started tweeting and following a certain demographic of people on twitter. I knew Gaston would be a hit with the ladies - and that’s exactly what I set out to do. We did some research on who would get us the most re-tweets and we started engaging them on twitter. By the end of the first week, we had more than 1000 local Vancouver followers watching our video and tweets. The new website was up by the end of the week and we were ready to start shooting our episodes.

We agreed from the beginning that Gaston Report would be a 10 episode set, but we had no clue what we were going to shoot. We just took one day at a time and tried to highlight some of the best events the city had to offer. We didn’t have an official press pass so we couldn’t enter or cover an Olympic event, but we did get as close to the action as possible. And as you can see from the videos - we had a blast!

Around this same time, CBC got wind of our little project thanks to our twitter marketing efforts and I received a call from Theresa Lalonde asking if we were interested on doing a news segment on Gaston. On one hand, it was the best news I’ve ever received - being able to get on national TV within a week of launching a fake persona is saying something about our talent… but blowing our cover is not what I wanted so early in the game. I agreed to do the show, hoping no one would notice. We never really talked about the segment after it aired, until our very final episode. Here’s the segment direct from CBC.

Which brings us back to the present - over the past 20 days, we successfully produced 10 episodes - our most viewed being the “Gold Man” episode with the very talented Lisa Bettany. We were stopped on streets by fans saying hi and taking photos, we were invited to restaurants, clubs and shows for free (all of which we politely declined as I didn’t think it was fair to them when they were expecting a real French journalist), and we were cheered on for our silly antics while shooting. But most of all - we had fun. The Olympics were the single most uniting thing this city has ever experienced and being able to enjoy it from the heart of it all is a once in a lifetime experience. I got to get out of the office plenty and being able to cheer on for our athletes with hundreds of thousands of proud Canadians is something we’ll always remember and cherish.

Hope you had fun with us along the way and were able to laugh it off when you discovered Gaston was not real. I think Gaston lives in all of us at Pallian HQ and you are always more than welcome to drop by and say hi. And next time when you’re looking for a successful social media marketing campaign for your business, you know who to call!

Merci et au revoir!

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