Alliance de l’Industrie Touristique du Québec
A Room With Many Views

The Goal

Unlike other destinations, Quebec does not have a distinctive landmark like the Taj Mahal, Empire State Building or Eiffel Tower. Nor does it have the cultural or social reputation of destinations like Amsterdam or Melbourne. Having no famous visual cue or audacious reputation makes it especially hard to distinguish Quebec from other destinations in highly competitive markets like France and the United States. Despite this situation, Quebec has an ambitious objective of increasing the numbers of travelers by 4.5% year after year for the next three years and leverage the consideration of Quebec as a major destination for travelers.

The Target

Quebec is fortunate enough to attract tourists from all over the world. However, the brand did concentrate on people living in Canada, North east of the United States and France. It created audience segments depending on their interests. Quebec can offer urban experience as well as nature, outdoor, foody or sport tourism.

Insights and Strategy

The truth is that there isn’t one single reason to travel to Quebec. There are many. Quebec is a destination in the heart of North America, full of European charm. Every day visiting Quebec is a new adventure, from experiencing the unique language and culture, to discovering its vast landscapes. In Québec, the tourist offering is so rich and diverse that you can live a completely different experience each day. It’s precisely this great diversity that sets Quebec apart, and the brand wanted to capture this in the campaign.

The Plan

The video showed a couple, opening the curtain to a room each day in a new destination, with a new view. Over 36 million travellers from France, US and Canada watched this online documentary, which ran for two weeks, supported by display banners. Then, consumers who had interacted with the banners ads without viewing the main video until the end were retargeted. This created a pool of audiences that the team analyzed and crossed this data with tourism trends specific to each country. New short-formed videos were then created and adapted for each audience segments, in each targeted country. These short videos were pushed via programmatic and social media to hundreds of segments matching the profiles created in the first wave. For instance, videos and banners showing Quebec’s vast gastronomy offering were pushed to segments identified as “foodies”.

An automated message sequence was then triggered and these consumers were shown with other activities they were likely to enjoy (like museums). The brand stayed true to its core strategy: each consumer was never exposed to the same ad twice, thus being, just like Glennis and Kip, surprised by Quebec’s diversity of landscapes and attractions.

All banners and short-formed videos led to Tourism Quebec interactive website that helped consumers plan a trip to Quebec, highlighting many of the experiences of Glennis and Kip.

Native integrations were also negotiated with key travel partners. Its reach and engaged audience significantly boosted the shares of the documentaries.

The Results

The agency used a pixel tag in its reservation tool which allows tracking consumers who bought a flight or an activity in Quebec. This tactic allowed the team to measure the campaign’s impact on reservations via 120-day study periods. The team was able to completely track 1,256 visits through the app pixel of Native Touch and the reservation engine of Air Transat which allow to measure the ROAS of the campaign’s media activation at 89.9$ per tourist. Thanks to this engagement approach, for the first time in tourism category, the brand was able to measure the visit at the destination as a prime indicator of commitment.

A Room With Many Views was a success as time spent on the website was 58% higher during the campaign. The main campaign video received more than 21 million views, 50% more than expected. In addition to the main video, over 15 million views of related campaign content was generated through PR and native placement. Searches for keywords related to the destination of Quebec have risen by 535% since the campaign.

But most importantly, Quebec saw an incredible increase of 6% in tourism revenue year over year (vs an objective of 4.5%) for a total of 15 billion dollars, a historical number for Quebec.

The campaign won the best of show at Internationalist for Media Innovation Awards in New York City and a Grand-Prix at Prix Média Infopresse in Montreal in the Best use of Data Category.