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The questions began popping up like graffiti across downtown Vancouver last week. "Why do we have more friends on Facebook than we do in reality?" read one query, seemingly scrawled by hand on a plain white poster. "Why do we prefer iPods to conversation?" read another. "When did smiling at someone on the street become creepy?" At the bottom of each was a clue to their origin and meaning: wheredidcommunitygo.com.

At that website, viewers found a melancholy video that felt like a quiet cri de coeur, with even more questions.

"Why are we inside more than ever?" asked the impish voice of a nine-year-old girl, as rudimentary images of nature - a bird, a tree, the sun - were covered over by hulking grey office buildings, and text cards that declared: Internet usage is up 73 per cent … Visits to parks down 10 per cent … Family dinners down 14 per cent. "We listen to our headphones, and not to each other," the voice continued. "What's happened to community? It's time to take it back."

Viewers were moved by the spot, and even as they acknowledged the irony of discussing our techno-fractured society in online forums, they agreed it had tapped into something profound. "What a simple and powerful message. Thanks," tweeted one woman in Louisville, Ky. Tweeters in Brazil, Latvia and elsewhere echoed the sentiment.

It has been a long time since the sponsor of those questions, the YMCA of Vancouver, has been a part of any such discussion. But in preparing for next month's opening of the new Robert Lee YMCA on Burrard Street, the Y realized it needed to step into the modern age of marketing, which is fixated on the importance of creating community. How serendipitous, then, that that's exactly what the Y has been doing in the city for the last 125 years.

"When we started working on the project, we had some understanding of what the YMCA was and what it means to us," says Paul Little, the creative director at TBWA\Vancouver, which created the campaign. "But we realized - wow, it had such a history, it's such an interesting brand. But it was kind of dormant; it wasn't really modernized. It was very quiet and sleepy."

The Y's problem was the same as that of the department stores that have lost their market share over the past few decades to savvier specialty retailers: It didn't know what it stood for any more. An iconic logo can only carry you so far.

"Most people would give their eye teeth for the recognition factor that we have. It's always over 90 per cent," observes Bill Stewart, the Vancouver Y's CEO, who has been with the organization for 35 years. "We're well known, but not known well for what we do."

To be fair, the range of its services would cause any marketer to take a step back: It offers adult education, runs programs to ease immigrants into the community, is the largest provider of non-profit daycare in Western Canada and has a large fitness centre. And with the recent flood of young families into the downtown core, the Y aspires to become their community living room.

How to market all of that? TBWA conducted a sort of brand archeology, digging down to the Y's past and extracting a brand essence that had been covered over through decades of indifference. "It's one of those brands that has such a rich history, such a strong value system," says Mr. Little, "that it wasn't really about us putting anything over the top and saying: This is what we think the Y is. Let's get ourselves out of the way and let the Y tell its own story."

The Y admits it has been a bit of an adjustment to move into the modern realm of marketing, with its talk of "brand essence."

"We haven't paid a lot of attention to [branding] People tell us that's wrong," Mr. Stewart says with a chuckle. "In today's world … the communication factor is becoming far more of a critical imperative."

This is certainly the first time the Y has tried to go viral. Its 60-second commercial, produced by Toronto's Head Gear Animation, was literally hand-made: The director, Isaac King, spent weeks cutting and shaping pieces of construction paper that he then photographed with a still camera for a stop-motion effect. The animation style is enjoying a revival these days as fans of the medium, growing tired of the slick treats of so many computer-animated films, turn to features like the recent Oscar-nominated film Fantastic Mr. Fox.

But the medium is also the message: In harkening back to a simpler time, when community referred to a geographic grouping of people rather than individuals sitting in front of screens around the world while watching the same YouTube "town hall," the spot's use of an earlier animation form helps to create a nostalgic yearning.

Head Gear, like just about everyone who contributed to the campaign, worked at sharp discounts from their usual fee scale. "It was a chance to really do something with a great message," Mr. King says. "As soon as I saw the script, I liked what it was about. It's a message that needs to be out there, because every day there's a new opportunity for a technology to kind of take over the time we'd spent outside or do some physical activity." He adds that, by taking on the assignment at a cut rate, he had a lot of creative freedom.

And even though the spot suggests we should all switch off our screens for a while, TBWA is reaching out to community-oriented bloggers and local sites to help get the word out. And yes, there's a vibrant community already growing at the project's Facebook page, where people are weighing in with their own stories of social dislocation. The Vancouver Y has also received informal queries about using the spot from other Ys across the continent, where the Y brand is similarly ill-defined.

Mr. Stewart says, at least in Vancouver, the campaign may be arriving at just the right time. During the Olympics, he notes, "there was a community being built here, and people loved it.

"People liked the idea of high-fiving each other and meeting people in fun environments and being a community. And that's gone. It's not gone forever, but it's gone from the streets and from Robson Square. People miss that. There's a sense that we should find ways to keep it. And that's part of who we are. We're one of those places where all people can come to."

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