The potential for a marketing payoff
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time: Bring thousands of the world's leaders and high-level bureaucrats to Toronto for a couple of days, wine and dine them between high-level discussions about geopolitics, and send them home with fond memories of a satisfying convention and a winning tourist destination.
But if the predictions of some marketers are correct, Toronto's G20 summit next weekend will not be just a lost opportunity to market the city, but might significantly hurt its brand.
As thousands flood in from the other G20 nations, Toronto's well-documented siege mentality, which has led to the planned closures of museums, theatres, sporting events and other tourist destinations, can only be bad for its image. “When you see the barricades up, the city has no charm any more,” says Ken Wong, a Queens University professor of marketing and vice-president of Toronto-based Level5 brand consultancy. “When you combine that with the likelihood of protesters, the city will lack any kind of [impression of being] a nice place to visit. If it becomes at all violent, it'll lose that positioning as well. All of these are essential to Toronto's current positioning in the marketplace, as a diverse place that everyone can come to.”
Inviting the world to Toronto and then shutting it down, he says, “is like inviting friends to your home and then having your wife throw them all out. Or husband.”
A different kind of ambush marketing: The gift-giving website LifeExperiencs.ca capitalizes on the anti-G20 sentiments with this billboard, unveiled Wednesday at the company’s headquarters on the outskirts of Toronto, spoofing the $57,000 ‘fake lake’ that has made international news and come to epitomize the summit’s perceived waste of taxpayer dollars. — LifeExperiencs.ca
The problem posed by the event
Marketing a city during a summit is a tough proposition anyway, especially at a time when news organizations have been cutting back and aren't interested in sending reporters and camera crews to foreign locales for long periods of time just to report on the setting of a meeting. When Pittsburgh hosted the G20 last September, executives with its convention and visitor's bureau recognized that if they wanted to tell the world about the city's transformation from steel town to a hub of new economy creativity, they would have to do so before the leaders set down.
Joe McGrath, CEO of Visit Pittsburgh: “We never planned on doing anything during the two and a half days of the summit, because we knew all the media would be captured in the building and not be doing anything except following the G20.”
Robert Li, University of South Carolina: “Place marketing, country marketing is quite different from corporate brand advertising, marketing. You have very limited weapons in your hand. Your product is much more ambiguous and fuzzy. You have very little control over your product. You don't really control your restaurant, you don't control your attractions – they are run by their owners. So for place marketers, the most dependable assets in their hand is their brand, and their job is to keep polishing their brand, keep building positive brand associations with it, and special events can help that.”
Workers install fences around the Toronto Metro Convention Centre that will host the G20 summit later this month, in Toronto on Monday, June 7, 2010.— Adrien Veczan/The Canadian Press
There is such a thing as bad publicity
Ken Wong, Queens University: “The people who come to this are not going to be embarking on the kind of activities that Toronto tries to impress itself upon the world with: the ROM, the Science Centre, the lakefront, these are not things they're going to be able to do, given the security concerns. And when you combine all of that with what I anticipate will be a very hostile person on the street, it's like bringing the world to see you on the wrong day. In theory, it's a nice idea but it will not be executed well. And the local media have of course been filled with stories of resentment about this, and that may become a story in the international press.
“In the case of Toronto, it's in a very precarious state of the city's brand development: It's not unknown, in fact it's known to be a very nice city. Americans love it, it's known to be a city that has considerable ethnic diversity that adds to its colour … So now when you're bringing people in, you're going to expose another tranche of the world to what is Toronto and they're going to come with a certain set of expectations based upon what they've read and what they've heard – most of which has been positive – and now they're going to see a city behind fences and they're going to see a city with protesters and a city with angry pedestrians, and drivers inconvenienced.”
Is this the image Toronto wants the world to see? Protests are an accepted part of the G8 and G20 summits. During a gathering in 2001 in Genoa, Italy, demonstrators, shown above, overturn a car during a clash with police. — Darko Bandic/The Associated Press
The Catch-22 (or is that Catch-G20?)
Robert Li, University of South Carolina: “If you do not host such events, if you say: 'We don't want to spend any dollars on brand awareness, because it doesn't bring us direct economic impact,' and then your competitors are doing this and they're enhancing their awareness and they're continuing to build on that, they can eventually built a competitive advantage over you. So even though you think, ‘What is the point of people mentioning our name?' in place marketing, your name is a very important asset for you.”
The bottom line on the bottom line
Ken Wong, Queens University: “If you were going to spend that kind of money to create a tourism opportunity, you'd want to be putting your best foot forward, and this intrinsically doesn't give you that opportunity, and the way that they've played it out, it absolutely means there is no opportunity. Nice idea, absolutely worst execution I can imagine.”
A police officer stands near security fence for the June 26-27 G20 Summit in Toronto June 14, 2010. — Mike Cassese/Reuters
$930-million worth of publicity
The staggering cost of the G20 made us wonder how much advertising could be had for nearly a billion dollars
- Every billboard in Times Square for 12 years
- Every commercial in 6 U.S. Super Bowl broadcasts*
- Every ad in Vogue magazine for 3.6 years**
- 5,816 full-colour, full-page ads in national editions of the Sunday New York Times
- 18.6 billion impressions on USA Today’s iPad application
* assuming low inflation
** based on 2009 ad sales
