Venerable American daily the Chicago Tribune launches its new brand platform this week with a campaign conceived and executed by Toronto agency Juniper Park.

Television, radio, print and out-of-home ads began appearing Monday morning, positioning the paper as the city’s champion.

One print ad, which shows a blue superhero mask, bears the words “Some guardians of the cities go the cape and tights route. We prefer notepad and ballpoint.”

Many of the ads refer to stories for which the newspaper has earned recognition. The ad that reads “Some school officials may be influenced but we don’t care who your daddy is” refers to a Tribune story that revealed the University of Illinois had a “clout” list of subpar students to be considered for admission based on political connections and affluence.

Marc Giannettino, the paper’s senior manager of brand marketing, said by focusing on the paper’s watchdog journalism, the campaign “takes us from a point of marketing the category to being able to market the brand. It’s not about convincing people to read a newspaper. It’s about articulating what the Chicago Tribune stands for.”

Juniper Park created the campaign on a project basis after Kathleen O’Hara, vice-president of marketing at the Chicago Tribune, saw the agency’s work for Frito-Lay presented at a marketing conference earlier this year.

“They were able to get to the core of a human truth,” O’Hara said about the presentation. “[The presentation] showed that it drove Lay’s business away from being considered just potato chips–fatty and bad for you–to the more emotional nature of what potato chips meant to you as a kid... I thought ‘If this agency can do that for potato chips, they certainly can do it for a newspaper that has more of an emotional reality.’ ”

After tracking down the agency, O’Hara gave them the brand campaign without a competitive review.

Juniper Park is the second Canadian agency to work with the Chicago daily this year. Zig, which has an office in Chicago, helped launch ChicagoNow.com, a flanker news, culture and events brand, in July.