When you live in a city, you don’t tend to visit the tourist-friendly attractions unless you have visitors from away.
For Torontonians with guests from Nova Scotia, those destinations include the CN Tower, the Hockey Hall of Fame and IKEA. (Many Nova Scotian’s bitterly rue the day Ikea left while simultaneously hoping it comes back).
So it was with some amusement that I recently spotted photos of the Toronto billboards for Nova Scotia on social media sites.
The ads tout the Maritime province’s natural attractions such as whale watching: “We heard you have an aquarium. That’s nice.”Another mentions the observation deck, highlighting the difference between the big city’s tower and Cape Breton’s natural beauty.
As a native Nova Scotian, I’ve never gone whale watching or driven the Cabot Trail, but it sounds like fun —and maybe the tourists have the right idea.
The billboards have recently gone viral, but they’re not new, says Mike MacKenzie, communications advisor with Nova Scotia Tourism. In fact “they haven’t been in market since May 2014.”
They were created just for the Toronto market to capitalize on the new aquarium, he says. “We wanted to leverage the fact that there was a current event happening that was relevant to our natural product.”The Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada opened in October 2013.
While the targeted campaign was specific to Toronto, general creative ads were placed in other markets, said MacKenzie.
“The creative platform was this notion of ‘Take yourself there,’says Shawn King, President and CCO of Extreme Group, the Halifax advertising agency that created the campaign. There were two meanings to the tag line, he says. “Take yourself there mentally, when you’re here and you…enjoy the place, you can benefit from that type of experience. And the other portion is literally —get yourself to Nova Scotia.”
He also mentioned that another billboard directed Toronto highway drivers to tune into a radio station that played the sounds of Nova Scotia —presumably while sitting in busy rush hour traffic.
The Extreme Group advertising agency recently lost the contract to Toronto-based agency DDB Canada.
MacKenzie says that the ads have gone viral on their own, that Tourism Nova Scotia wasn’t behind it at all.
The campaign was successful when it was first launched, but “It’s so weird how this went viral after so long, it was literally weeks after we lost the account,”King says. “Wow, this is bittersweet.”
Ontario and Quebec are important markets for Nova Scotia Tourism, as well as the North Eastern United States, and they’re also looking to expand internationally, says MacKenzie. “Germany and the UK are important markets for us because there’s direct air access from Halifax…we know that's a big factor in how people choose to travel.”