Matt McDowell, Toshiba Europe’s marketing director of lifestyle products and service, told Marketing that the return to TV advertising marked Toshiba’s confidence in the product, describing the Encore as tablet "worth shouting about".
As part of a fully integrated campaign, a 40-second TV ad has been created by McCann Enterprise and goes live on 1 December.
The ad uses the slogan "Look closer. See more." and shows the tablet held in someone’s hand, before the camera zooms in and delves into four animated worlds, each of which represents one the Encore’s features categories.
McDowell said: "The journey starts in the world of entertainment and music and everything depicted in that world is related to the product, some abstractly, some fun, but every drawing in there is related to the product."
The other worlds in the ad represent: productivity, particularly its Microsoft Office software; gaming, with reference to the Encore's Xbox compatibility; and connectivity, which references its optimisation with Skype.
A ten-second teaser goes live tomorrow on YouTube.
The ad will also run across cinemas, with supporting marketing activity including digital, viral and social. From 25 November, a series of six video vignettes, each plugging a different feature of the Encore, will be seeded virally.
McDowell admits that creating standout in the tablet market is a challenge.
He said: "Toshiba doesn’t invest the marketing budgets that Samsung and Apple do. We rely more on the quality of the product. So we had to do something different."
The Encore has been designed "from the ground up" in conjunction with Microsoft. Toshiba is spending £4m across Europe, with the UK taking the biggest proportion of that spend.
The tablet is slightly larger than Apple’s seven-inch iPad Mini, which retails from around £250, the same price as the Encore.
McDowell stressed that the Encore will have sufficient standout in an increasingly busy tablet sector:
He said: "It has a breadth of productivity and features unlike anything in else in the market.
"From a full version of Microsoft Office Home and Student, free Xbox Music, Skype optimisation, incredible screen and speakers. Everything has been designed specifically for a handheld device rather a larger tablet. There are other devices that are cheaper, but not with all those features."
The encore goes on sale in December, with the campaign designed to drive sales in the build up to Christmas. Toshiba's target market is consumers and prosumers who are in the market for a secondary device that they can use alongside their Windows 8.1 computer and Xbox gaming console.
Toshiba last advertised on TV in 2009, with a £3m campaign featuring the "Space Chair" – an actual chair that descended from the outer limits of the Earth’s atmosphere.
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