Timing of Campaign: Launched June 22, 2016.

The Goal

The Ontario Tourism Marketing Partnership wanted to drive tourism to Ontario by helping people discover the unfamiliar yet desirable side of Ontario.

Target

Domestic Canadian travellers, with a focus on young families. This is an audience that is familiar with Ontario; they assume there is nothing new or intriguing to discovering in a province they already know well.

The Insight

Research revealed that when it comes to travel, people are looking for the unfamiliar and seeking experiences that are new and different from where they live and what they know. But the conventional approach to tourism marketing focuses heavily on the most well-known and famous landmarks, further reinforcing the sense that Ontario is too familiar to be a desirable destination.

Today, an overwhelming majority of travel research is conducted online, with many travellers spending upwards of 30 hours online prior to booking a trip. In the last two years, Instagram has fast become the go-to platform for people to find travel inspiration.

Agency FCB realized that in order to break through and change Canadians’ perceptions of Ontario, they would need to take a counter-intuitive approach and focus on all the people, places and experiences in Ontario that people don’t know about.

So they played hard to get and created a campaign without revealing it was from Ontario, instead challenging Canadians to answer the question: “Where am I?”

The Plan

To counter the bias against Ontario, the brand needed to disrupt the conventions of the category. To get travellers to re-assess Ontario as a destination, it had to engage.

The team changed the game in tourism advertising by not showing any recognizable attractions or famous landmarks, or even naming the destination. They created engagement with a game.

On June 22, they launched a ten-day teaser using TV, online video and social media (Facebook and Instagram). This intriguing yet unfamiliar content, crafted in the form of riddles, drew people in and challenged them to answer the question: “Where Am I?” Every day new visual clues were revealed on Instagram, with hundreds of clues being revealed over 10 days.

The campaign drove to a consumer microsite, whereami.com/awards, a campaign experience embedded within ontariotravel.net where users could take their guess.

Technology and Tools

A built in geo-guesser using Google Maps API created a virtual game of ‘hot and cold’ in kilometres. One traveller guessed ‘the Vatican,’ which was 7,100 kilometres off and a long way from the correct answer of St. Paul’s Basilica in downtown Toronto.

User Experience

To keep consumers engaged, the team revealed a new clue each day and watched as something amazing happened: the power of intrigue motivated one in three users to return to the site, and of those users 48% came back twice. The virtual guessing game was a success.

Supporting Channels

The agency needed to provoke interest and drive consumers to re-evaluate their perceptions of Ontario, so it had to present a bold alternative vision of Ontario. This was accomplished through 60-second TV, cinema, pre-roll and social media spots that had a confidence and swagger consumers would find unexpected coming from Ontario.

On July 2, 2016, the team revealed that these incredible places and experiences were in fact in Ontario.

The power of surprise and intrigue surrounding this new and unexpected Ontario created a desire to find out more about the specific attractions and experiences presented in the campaign. So the team fulfilled that desire by linking the clues and map-pinning all of those visuals on ontariotravel.net, where people could find details of what Ontario had to offer and easily book their travel.

The Results

The campaign engaged Canadians across the country, driving them to learn more about Ontario and book travel. One in 309 Canadians from 480 cities participated in the online guessing game, but only 13% got it right. Not even people in Ontario recognized Ontario.

During the ten-day teaser period, the microsite received more than 60,000 visits and 30,000 guesses.

After the big reveal of Ontario, travel to and within the province increased dramatically, with overnight visits tripling and summer trips nearly doubling.

The campaign returned $7.23 for every dollar spent, and has now been launched across the U.S. and the U.K.