Re: Toronto Unlimited Ads
A further summary/critique of the mess, from the Star:
Jul. 23, 2005. 09:24 AM
Limits to tourism vision
Tourism Toronto might not have faced such criticism for `Toronto Unlimited' if it hadn't been stuck with a second choice
LINDA DIEBEL
Here's the scene last Tuesday afternoon in the boardroom of Tourism Toronto on Queens Quay W.
Bruce MacMillan, CEO of Tourism Toronto, was at the head of an enormous table, his back against a window overlooking a panoramic view of Lake Ontario. Across the table was Chris Winsor, a senior associate at the PR firm Hill & Knowlton and a consultant for Tourism Toronto. He had set up the interview with MacMillan and, as it unfolded over the next hour, would amplify or clarify his remarks. Moving around the table's impressive bulk was an assistant, who placed coffee in front of the reporter and carried bottled water and a glass for Winsor.
MacMillan was describing how Vancouver, Philadelphia and Montreal used to have an edge over Toronto because these cities had a dedicated source of funding for tourism promotion. "But Toronto was not in that position. We were the last of our competitors — WHOA!"
He jerked up to stare at the assistant — or sudden lack of.
She was down. Gone, under the table. Silently, except for the thud of the empty glass scudding into the wall when she fell.
Whoa! is right. "I'm fine, I'm fine," she said, embarrassed and scrambling to her feet. "Sorry to interrupt you."
"Jeez, that power cord!" said Winsor, indicating that somebody had to do something about the errant cord, which lay across the floor between table and wall. MacMillan agreed. He remained in his chair and the interview resumed.
But the image of that cord, and the trouble it caused to a perfectly decent person, sticks as a metaphor for Tourism Toronto and its problems. In full public view, it appears to have fallen flat on its face.
These should be glory days. Last month, at the end of a 13-month process, the private sector organization, working in conjunction with its partners (the province, the federal government and the Toronto City Summit Alliance), unveiled the results of a much ballyhooed $4-million search for a brand for Toronto. But the new logo, "Toronto Unlimited," and the ensuing ad campaign in the New York Times and other U.S. publications, landed with a thud.
"An embarrassment, indefensible," Mayor David Miller told the Toronto Star's Royson James, referring to the ads. There was a "July Unlimited" calendar of outdated events, whose message Councillor Brian Ashton (Ward 36, Scarborough South) describes as: "Look what you've missed, you idiots."
Sludge-like advertising copy referred to Toronto as "a product of natural occurrences."
Those who weren't angry, tittered, and MacMillan and his crew seemed to be stung. Winsor complained that Tourism Toronto was being targeted unfairly.
But the negative reaction was widespread.
"I have not heard a single positive comment. I don't know how this could have happened," says Lynda Friendly, former chair of the Tourism Toronto board and a member of the committee that approved MacMillan's hire in 2002. (The board has 39 members, including six city councillors and representatives from the hotel and travel industry, even the Toronto Zoo.)
"Bruce MacMillan is hard-working. He is an excellent leader and a fine executive ... everyone is looking for a fall guy," she says, before adding: "I must say that I was absolutely astonished that this was allowed to go forward."
But perhaps that's the point: "Toronto Unlimited" wasn't supposed to go anywhere, according to several people involved in the decision-making process.
The Toronto Branding Project, headed by American marketer Elizabeth Gill, faced innumerable problems. There were committees within committees, scheduling snafus, bitterness over money, friction with city bureaucrats and an intensely public feud between the politicians and the promoters that has grown worse in recent days.
But surely the biggest hurdle was that, until late spring, the project was moving forward with an entirely different branding vision for the city. Insiders report that the advertising team had come up with the tagline, "Toronto: Imagine," and it was to have been a campaign based on the "City of Imagination."
This campaign was sent to the mayor's office as part of the consultative process. He passed it to staffers in the city's economic development department who quickly discovered that "Imagine" was registered elsewhere. It's a moot point because Miller apparently didn't like it anyway.
Ashton, chair of the advisory committee on the branding project, was taken aback when his group received the campaign. "It was used extensively elsewhere and I was surprised that the consultants didn't know that,'' he says. "We told them to go back and find something else."
At Tourism Toronto, MacMillan and Gill say that "Toronto: Imagine" was merely one tagline being considered. Says MacMillan: "Yeah, it was one of the finalists."
But Ashton says it went far beyond that, and that the advertising team had to scramble to find an alternative vision in time for a summer ad campaign.
"Time was definitely not their ally," he says.
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MacMillan, a North Vancouver native, arrived in Toronto in January 2003 via Dallas, Texas. He was vice-president of marketing for Meeting Professionals International. "They called (from Toronto) and I said that's an interesting opportunity and here I am," he says, leaning back in his chair. He is tall and lanky, 44, with preppy good looks and a casual summer elegance — khakis, blue-striped shirt, navy blue blazer and shoes with a side buckle.
He and his wife, Judy, and their two girls moved into a house in Oakville and he settled into his job. Six weeks later, SARS hit Toronto and tourism plummeted. In the first month, 12,000 people lost their jobs in the industry.
"Nobody had ever experienced an epidemiological outbreak in a western city like that or the impact that it had," he says. "There was no Top 10 list of what to do when this happens. We were looking into an abyss."
The crisis galvanized the city's business leaders, who pushed the city to, among other initiatives, initiate a hotel tax of 3 per cent, officially called the "destination marketing fee," and use the money to finance Tourism Toronto. The organization went from a shoestring budget to annual revenues of about $25 million, 85 per cent of it paid by the tax and the rest from the province and the city.
There are tensions over the money with city politicians who are frustrated that while Toronto is broke, its convention and visitor's bureau has a guaranteed income. "I sense that they are almost intoxicated with new money they didn't have before," says Ashton, who is critical of Tourism Toronto. "There is a lot of friction now between Tourism Toronto and the city."
By July 2004, the various partners in the rejuvenation of tourism began to work on developing a single new brand for Toronto. They wanted to erase the "SARS city" image, as well as a lack of a well-defined image among Americans. Tourism Toronto put in $2 million, the province, $1 million, the private sector, through the Toronto City Summit Alliance group, $500,000 and the federal government, $500,000.
Several committees were struck, including a working group, a steering committee and an advisory board, all responsible to their respective partners. (Tourism Toronto, as a private organization, reports to its audit committee and board. All salaries and consulting fees are confidential.) MacMillan stresses that Tourism Toronto's partners were consulted "every step of the way" in coming up with the campaign.
Lynda Friendly suggests that the consultative process could have been one of the downfalls of the branding campaign. She says the final product lacks passion. "But this is what happens when you've got too many committees, too many cooks and too many opinions. Everything is neutralized."
Pecault, while disappointed with the ad campaign, notes that the market research was extensive and extremely valuable. It was the first time that the U.S. market in particular was probed to such a degree on images of Toronto. There was shock when focus groups indicated that people associated the city with grizzly bears in trees.
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On the telephone, Elizabeth Gill is trying to explain the intricacies of the brand strategy to a thick-headed reporter who lacks a marketing background. "The brand strategy is the promise of the brand," she says, "while the logo and tagline are the visual representation."
It's not getting through and, finally, she turns to Mickey Mouse. Are you ready, girls 'n' boys?
"Let me use Disney because that is what I know," says Gill, who, before coming to Toronto two years ago to marry a Canadian, spent 11 years with the Walt Disney Co. Born in Pittsburgh, she was in the corporate brand management group and, for the last four years, worked on strategic brand marketing. She was involved in marketing the $1.4 billion expansion of Disneyland Resorts. (Of her adopted city of Toronto, she says: "I was pleasantly surprised.")
She begins explaining the branding project slowly, asserting that, at Disney, the brand strategy is "wholesome fun and family entertainment," while the logo is Mickey Mouse and the Walt Disney signature in the "distinctive Disney script."
With Toronto, the strategy is "engaging the imagination in a city of unlimited possibilities," she says. (One can almost see how the campaign might have evolved from the city of imagination to the unlimited city.)
The logo is the stylized, shaded TO and the tagline is "Toronto Unlimited." Gill says that in the beginning 60 agencies in the United States, Canada and the U.K. expressed interest in creating the branding and advertising campaign. There were 22 submissions and seven firms made the shortlist.
Two advertising firms were chosen to form a partnership: TBWA Toronto and Brand Architecture International, based in New York. Both firms are part of the Omnicom group of companies.
There has been criticism about the choice of firms. Ashton, for one, says that he would have liked to see a competition among three or four Toronto teams to come up with a campaign with soul. "The problem is that we know in our guts that it doesn't capture who we are," he says.
Miller, who signed off on the tagline "Toronto Unlimited" says he wasn't consulted on the advertising copy. He says it's so bad that the advertising agency should be fired. He doesn't see a resolution of the city's problems with Tourism Toronto and adds that "the one with the money calls the tune."
At the heart of it, Miller explains, is that Tourism Toronto "doesn't understand that it is Toronto's ambassador and represents the whole city. It's not just there to run ads in other countries. It's about us too and what we think about ourselves, and they don't get that."
Toronto designer Errol Saldahna, who teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design, has created a blog about the campaign, called Toronto Limited (
www.torontolimited.blogspot.com).
"We have to ask," says one respondent. "Could they not find a 100 per cent Canadian-owned branding agency that was capable of leading the development of the Toronto brand? Would the city of New York use Canadian-owned agencies to lead a New York Branding Project? True to their brand, New Yorkers would be outraged."
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The image of the power cord — an accident waiting to happen — resonates through other glitches and flubs at Tourism Toronto. For starters, it almost seems as if nobody is reading their own material. Winsor hands out a press kit which, naturally, extols the virtues of the beleaguered agency. It contains a copy of a Conde Nast Traveler article which ran in April and which, says MacMillan, made his day when he first head about the magazine's plans last July.
Also included in the list, however, is an article from Wallpaper.
"It's not that it's an exceptionally beautiful urban mass, but nor is it ugly and unkept," says the article about Toronto. "It's not aggressively `different' but neither is it short on creativity."
Well, okay. Guess that will have to do.
There is also a Top List of things to do in the city.
No. 1 — leave the city. Or, as Wallpaper puts it, "investigate an invite to a cosy log cabin on a lake for the weekend."
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Through much of the interview, MacMillan has seemed defensive. But, later, when he relaxes in a telephone interview, he shows he can be quite passionate about Toronto. He compares exploring his favorite part of town — Little Italy — to always hearing new things in Pink Floyd's classic album, Dark Side of the Moon.
He talks about some of the Toronto stories discovered in the market research and says he is particularly fond of a comment that all you need in Toronto is a "couple of subway tokens and a big appetite."
Asked if Tourism Toronto has used such material in the campaign, he replies that it didn't.
"Look, in advertising, everybody has an opinion, correct?" he says, when asked how he's bearing up to the criticism of "Toronto Unlimited."
"But the most important thing advertising can do is elicit a response. The worst thing that could have happened is that nobody noticed," he says. There is no chance that the brand will be scrapped, or that Tourism Toronto will start over from scratch, as some have suggested.
"I think you have to give a brand a chance to grow," he says. He makes the point, as do Winsor and Gill, that the I `heart' New York campaign wasn't popular when it first came out in 1977 for New York state.
"We now recognize it as a paradigm of branding and yet you go back and people sort of looked at it and it was universally loathed," says Winsor.
That's a good story, urban myth, legend.
Stan Dragoti, from Wells Rich Greene Inc. in New York, partnered with Charlie Moss on the project almost 30 years ago. Moss came up with the theme and Milton Glazer designed the logotype with three letters and a symbol. I `heart' NY.
"We paid Milt Glasner and it was a hit from the beginning," says Dragoti, the agency's executive creative director, in a telephone interview from New York. "Everything was a success — the song, the campaign — people responded in such a positive way."
What about Toronto Unlimited?
"Well, it sounds like a firm," he replies. But he adds that he doesn't want to jump to conclusions. "I could be eating my words. The execution of the campaign could be brilliant. Is it?"
GB
