Tourisme Montréal’s new marketing campaign features a drunken 3 a.m. booty call; a simple piano-led spot featuring people talking about the city’s virtues, and drone-shot footage that brings a new perspective to the city’s famed Olympic Stadium.
The city’s tourism agency has partnered with eight local directors to create a series of short films about the city, which will be posted to social networks using the #MTLmoments hashtag. The hashtag has permeated the public’s consciousness since its 2012 introduction, featured in more than 423,000 posts on Instagram alone.
The first four short films, created by film and commercial director Iouri Philippe Paillé, Yan Giroux (who has directed commercials for clients including Ford, Bell and Fujitsu), Mathieu Grimard and Mélissa Matos are live now at the dedicated #MtlMoments website.
Unlike typical tourism marketing efforts, the four short films are quiet, even a little strange; they eschew the standard shots of attractions, restaurants and landmarks to create a more evocative portrait of the city’s people and places.
All of the directors were given carte blanche when it came to making their film, with the only stipulation that it be based on a photograph that inspired them. Grimard’s nearly four-minute film Huit, for example, is based on a shot of two people inside one of the city’s cafés, and juxtaposes interviews with eight Montrealers about why they love the city with images of various cityscapes.
“We’re using the film series to reinforce the fact that Montreal is a very cool place to visit,” said Andrée-Anne Pelletier, manager of corporate public relations for Tourisme Montréal. “We know that millennials don’t care about traditional advertising, so that’s why we used this very interesting project to highlight the city’s creativity and talent.”
The film series is a key part of the Montréal Ignites campaign, with a particular emphasis on New York and the Northeastern U.S. Built around the tagline “Meet the other city that never sleeps,” the effort is specifically targeted at millennial audiences in the region.
A second wave of films by directors Vincent Bilodeau, Gabriel Poirier-Galarneu, Akim Gagnon and the stop-motion duo Clyde Henry will launch in the summer, said Tourisme Montréal.
Montreal attracted 9.6 million visitors in 2015 according to Tourism Montreal, a 3.2% increase over the previous year. The organization also reported an “accelerated return” of visitors from Ontario and the United States, with visits from the latter group increasing 9.9%.
“Meet the other city that never sleeps” builds on last year’s New York-centric marketing plan, which was built around the tagline Kiss Your Plans Goodbye and positioned the city as young, fun and accessible.
According to Tourism Montréal’s 2015 annual report, among groups exposed to the campaign 25-34 year-olds were most likely to want to visit the city, while a series of 10-second videos on Facebook generated 1.2 million views lasting more than three seconds.
The campaign also attracted 94,000 visits to its destination page, a 240% increase in traffic to the site over the year-earlier period, and 1,259 e-mail addresses added to its database.
The new campaign was developed in association with Montreal agency Lg2, which replaced Sid Lee as Tourisme Montréal’s creative agency last spring.
