T.O.'s selling point: Boredom
T.O.'s selling point: Boredom
January 26, 2007
John Spears
Donovan Vincent
CITY HALL BUREAU
Toronto men fantasize about French chambermaids wearing orange polyester pantsuits.
And Toronto women? They just can't make their breasts small enough.
But, like, you should visit here, eh, and check out our great theatres, art and opera. That's the pitch the city of Toronto's Live with Culture campaigners are hoping will pique some tourism interest south of the border.
They've placed a series of four ads in alternative weeklies in eight U.S. border cities: Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Ithaca, N.Y., Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago and Pittsburgh.
For example, one ad depicts a bathroom scene with a thin woman in her underwear asking her partner, "Do you think I need a breast reduction?" The tagline for the ad is "Toronto. Nothing like Hollywood. Except for the film."
Another shows a bedroom scene with a woman role-playing as a maid – complete with pants and sensible shoes – and suggestively looking at a man. The tagline: "Toronto. Nothing like Paris. Except for the Art."
The ads poke fun at Toronto and other major cities around the world.
The idea for the campaign came about because the Live with Culture promotion budget had a bit of cash left in the till, says the program's manager Gregory Nixon.
Cities usually promote tourism by listing events and attractions, said Nixon, but he wanted a different approach.
"I began to think our ads just looked like everybody else's."
He decided to experiment with some off-centre ads in less-expensive publications.
Research consistently shows that Toronto's image is fusty, he said. "People thought Toronto was clean and safe but not particularly sexy. It didn't have much of an edge about it. It was kind of a lukewarm response. And that's not really going to get people driving across the border.
"So we thought, why don't we play with it, to promote a discussion and plant the idea in people's heads that Toronto might be slightly more interesting than the way it's been promoting itself in the past."
He approached Foote, Cone & Belding Canada to come up with some ideas, and liked what they delivered.
Now he'd like to hear from a broader audience.
"We want to get a debate going around this thing: Does it work or doesn't it?"
City councillor Kyle Rae, who chairs Toronto economic development committee, had praise for the ads. "These are great. They're funny, they're poking fun at us, and will probably generate an interest in Toronto in other people who think of us as just another boring city north of the 49th parallel," said Rae, whose committee is responsible for Toronto's culture and tourism industry.
But the ad campaign sparked vastly different reactions when the Star showed them to two Toronto image consultants.
One loved them, the other found them somewhat offensive.
"The message delivered in these ads run the risk of offending many Torontonians due to the politically incorrect spin,'' said Daniela Mastragostino, of NovéImage Consulting.
"I'm half-Italian, half-Hungarian, and don't appreciate reading an ad that insinuates that Toronto is nothing like Italy except for the opera because that's untrue," she added.
"Some of the quotes hold a distasteful message and can be quite offensive," she said.
"In trying to bring Toronto up we're putting other cities down, which doesn't make sense because Toronto is a make-up of other cities."
But Savka Taurasi, who runs Savvy Image Group, thinks the ads are fantastic.
"The average reader will do a double-take, and that's what's great," she said, praising the ads as "edgy, different and unexpected."
"It will definitely get people talking and that's what you want."
Both Taurasi and Mastragostino are members of the Toronto chapter of the Association of Image Consultants International. But Andrew Weir, vice-president at Tourism Toronto, the pubic-private tourist promotion agency that bills itself as the city's tourism industry's "official destination marketing organization," says the campaign is off-strategy. "We're generally marketing to higher household income families in the U.S. and to people that are more likely to have passports," he said. "I'm not sure this campaign is hitting that market."
I LOVE IT!!!
Louroz
