TSR Bests 4 Shops to Win Toshiba

TSR Advertising has landed creative and media duties for Toshiba America Consumer Products following a review, the client confirmed. Billings are estimated at $15 million.

“[TSR] brought to the table a new way of looking at our target audience that we hadn’t had be-fore,” said Susan Shelby, Toshiba’s director of corporate communications. “It was a little more exciting, a little edgier.”

New York-based TSR topped four other shops in the re-view, which began in early June and ended in late August, Shelby said. The Wayne, N.J.-based client would not disclose the other contenders, but sources said they were New York shops Hampel/Stefanides and 27-year incumbent FerrellCalvillo Communications, as well as North Castle Partners in Stamford, Conn.

Shelby denied that dissatisfaction with FerrellCalvillo triggered the re-view. “It was nothing that [the shop] did per se,” she said. “It was a management decision to get a more competitive environment for our advertising, to freshen it up, and competition was the best way to do that.”

FerrellCalvillo’s recent ads for the client showed a 1940s family watching as a new HDTV is unwrapped.

TSR co-chairman Bob Kantor said his shop pitched “very aggressive creative work. So much of the category looks the same, and we showed them a campaign that was creative and unique to the category.”

TSR’s first work for the client, to break in November or December, will introduce new products that include HDTVs and DVD players.

The client is a unit of Toshiba America, which spent nearly $25 million on advertising in 1999, per Competitive Media Reporting. Frank Veronsky