Destination Toronto is championing the city as a complex, layered and multicultural destination in a new digitally-led campaign.
“Toronto 100%” is the latest effort by the DMO and first work led by agency partner Lifelong Crush.
Creative, rolling out this month, was released to industry stakeholders and revealed to Torontonians this spring as part of creative-sentiment testing to see if it accurately reflected the city’s vibe to its own inhabitants.
“I think it was really important for us going into this,” says Paula Port, Destination Toronto’s VP of global marketing. “I mean, this is personal for the people of Toronto, right? So we wanted to make sure that the story we’re telling aligns with how Torontonians see their city, [and] how they want it to be reflected to the world as well.”
“There’s a lot of voices that influence how Toronto’s story is told outside of the city. So we wanted to make sure that we were able to amplify those voices and that we were on the same page in our storytelling.”
The program launched last week in Ontario, Quebec and the American border states with additional rollouts in California and the cities of Washington and Chicago.
The messaging presents Toronto as a global community and focuses on the diverse array of attractions on offer in the city.
While Toronto experienced a slight decline in U.S. visitors in the first quarter, Port says the period generally represents only about a fifth or 20% of the city’s annual tourism visits.
“If we look ahead to advanced bookings for July and September, we are pacing ahead of last year,” Port says. “So we are very optimistic about the opportunity for this summer.”
The “Toronto 100%” positioning is being treated by the DMO as a longer-term platform, which will be expanded on through next year.
The campaign is being led digitally across markets with a robust social presence on Reddit, YouTube, Meta and Pinterest. A French version of the work is rolling out in Montreal. The campaign media buyer is Initiative.
Port says one of the challenges in marketing Toronto is that it’s not a simple or one-note destination. “It’s complex and it’s layered, and that’s what makes it so great.”
In terms of diversity, the creative zeroes in on the positive outcomes created when different cultural perspectives collide, like how Chinese-Jamaican fusion restaurant like Patois can spring up in Little Portugal.
The target audience for Ontario, Quebec and the border states is couples and families.
For the U.S. fly-in market, Port says families and affluent travellers are the key demographics.
Destination Toronto leveraged some of Destination Canada’s recent traveller segmentation research to inform the “Toronto 100%” rollout.
This month, Destination Toronto announced the opening of offices in the U.K. and Germany, “advancing the city’s global tourism strategy and expanding its reach with international leisure and business travellers,”
