2020 Winner
2020 Winners
The Royal Agricultural Winter Fair
Lil' Ben and the Road to The Royal
The Royal Agricultural Winter Fair is the world’s largest indoor agricultural event, designed to ‘bring the country to the city’. A 97-year-old tradition, the event hit a peak in popularity in the 1990s - but more recently, two key trends have impacted awareness and attendance:
- Increased competition. On any given day in 2019, Toronto was host to hundreds of events - large and small. While The Royal used to be the talk of the town, it’s become one in a long list of high-profile happenings in Canada’s largest city.
- An influx of new Toronto residents with no past connection to The Fair. The Royal built its business on multigenerational, repeat visitors but today, 18% of the city’s population are recent immigrants and less than 50% of Toronto’s population was born in Canada. The Royal could no longer rely on nostalgia and tradition as key attendance drivers.
In 2018, attendance had dropped to 258,000 - a significant decrease from historic highs. The Fair needed to increase overall awareness and give Torontonians a reason to attend this iconic event. And since, as a non-profit, marketing budgets are limited and fixed based on the previous year’s revenue (and 2018’s low attendance numbers meant no new money in 2019), the solution couldn’t come from spending more - it had to come from working smarter.
Our challenge: get Torontonians coming back to The Royal, supporting the overall business objective of a 5% increase in attendance over 2018.
Insights and Strategy
With a budget of only $30,000, we set a bold objective dubbed “50/50”: secure at least 50 million earned media impressions - and land at least 50% of coverage before the end of the first day of The Royal, ensuring that busy Toronto families would not only hear about the 10 day event, but would have time to visit the Fair themselves.
To develop our strategy, we conducted an audit of past coverage to understand what had - and hadn’t - worked historically. We identified a challenge, and an opportunity:
- Media loved creating content at the Fair, where they could film and photograph animals, crops and crowds of happy children, but that wouldn’t help achieve our pre-event coverage targets. Logistically, there was no way to bring media into The Royal in advance of Opening Day, so we needed a way to bring the visual appeal of The Royal to media, without bringing media to The Royal.
- In 2015, The Royal had found media relations success by bringing a goat on the GO Train as part of a pre-event promotion in partnership with Metrolinx. In this one-off event, we had the nugget of an idea.
Our solution? Turn the 2015 stunt into the pillar of our 2019 PR program, creating an official Royal Ambassador (an animal!) to bring the magic of The Royal to media and consumers in the lead-up to - and throughout - The Fair.
Execution
We worked hand-in-hand with the team at The Royal to find ‘Lil Ben, a photogenic 24-year old mini-horse, and our 2019 Royal Agricultural Winter Fair Ambassador. And then we put ‘Lil Ben at the centre of a multi-pronged PR campaign that included:
- A pre-Opening Day media opportunity, replicating the 2015 moment that started it all by bringing Lil’ Ben from Port Credit to Toronto on the GO Train on the Monday before The Fair opened.
- An Opening Day photo op and ribbon cutting for Lil’ Ben with Mayor John Tory to maximize day one coverage.
- Making Lil’ Ben “Insta-famous” by curating personalized ‘Royal’ experiences for social media influencers including a “selfie stop” with our Royal Ambassador.
- Leveraging Lil’ Ben for ongoing opportunities with a wide variety of media outlets. Throughout The Fair, he was paired with relevant spokespeople for engaging, colourful interviews.
Results and Impact
With Lil’ Ben’s help, we overachieved on our 50/50 goal, securing a record-setting 116 million traditional and social media impressions - more than half of which ran before the end of the Fair’s first day. Lil’ Ben personally appeared in interviews with 8 of Toronto’s top tier media outlets, including Breakfast Television, Global’s The Morning Show and CP24.
Ultimately, we knew the success of the 2019 Royal Agricultural Winter Fair would be measured at the box office - and we’re thrilled to say that we delivered. Ticket sales increased by 7% (besting the 5% business objective) and more than 276,000 consumers visited the 2019 event.