Toronto has a problem.
No, not the $700-million-plus looming budget shortfall, or the head-crushing summertime road construction, or the dreadful state of the city’s so-called professional sports teams. No, according to research, Toronto is a wallflower whose sweetest charms usually stay hidden from visitors.
And for the city’s tourism bureau, that’s a challenge.
“The thing we’re dealing with, always, is Toronto is underrated as a destination. It feels a little beige. Average. Nice enough, I suppose,” said Shelley Brown, the CEO of Crispin Porter + Bogusky Canada, which is the new lead marketing agency for Tourism Toronto.
While residents love the city, tourists have a hard time penetrating it on a first visit, and therefore don’t become evangelists for it after they leave.
“Montreal comes with a certain reputation for already being different, certainly unique in North America. But Toronto doesn’t have that reputation, so what we’re really dealing with is this kind of obscurity that Toronto has, this beige-ness; North American tourists are all a little bit vague about it.”
The city’s tourism numbers are creeping back up after the recession, with 3.2 per cent more overnight visitors in 2010 than 2009, and spending by those visitors rising 5.5 per cent; but both figures are still below 2008 levels. Crispin Porter believed that, if the city could speak for itself, visitors might better access its attractions, and leave far more satisfied.
So they created Toronto Trending, an online tool that seeks to capture the city’s life as it is lived at the street level. When people check in on FourSquare to a restaurant, a store, a sporting event, a nightlife spot, or an arts and entertainment attraction, TorontoTrending.com will capture that information and display it on a satellite-view picture of the city. When they tweet about something going on using the hash tag #torontotrending, the website will pull that in from Twitter and push it out to those looking for a real-time view of what’s going on in the city.
In its attempt to make the opaque life of the city more transparent, the project echoes the redesign of the free downtown newspaper Eye Weekly, which was rechristened The Grid two weeks ago. That paper also spotlights regular people in their natural habitat and places them on a map, literally bringing the city’s street grid to life.
Both efforts highlight the city’s diverse offerings, from arts and culture to sports, outdoor events, and community activities. “One of the things we’ve really learned, working on the brand that is the City of Toronto, is we shouldn’t try to define it,” explained Ms. Brown. “The second you start to define it, you’re actually cutting off an aspect of what the city really is, and therefore cutting off some people from the city and what it could mean for them.”
“We can define what it’s like to experience the city, but we shouldn’t try to tell people what Toronto is, because Toronto will be for them whatever they make it. Our job is to simply make it as easy, as exciting, as interesting to consume the city as possible.”
Just up the road, Montreal is taking a different, if similarly offbeat, approach to highlighting its own diverse offerings. It’s in the midst of a $25-million marketing campaign created by the agency Sid Lee, featuring animal mash-ups – characters like the bullguin, a half-bulldog-half-penguin, and the half-bear-half-toucan bearcan – to represent the city as a place that offers “a new breed of culture.”
