This Thursday is the launch of a brand new city event called the WRLDCTY Virtual Festival (vowels, clearly, suck). Presented by Vancouver-based Resonance Consultancy, the "host cities" are New York, London, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, and Toronto.
The idea is to bring together thought leaders and city lovers from all around the world on a virtual platform for three days. The speakers include people like Richard Florida, Bjarke Ingels, and Dan Doctoroff.
The other thing they're doing is offering up over 20 virtual urban experiences. Think yoga on Santa Monica Pier, burlesque in Brooklyn, and graffiti art tours in Toronto. It's clearly no substitute for actual travel, but this is the best we've got right now and we're all trying to adapt.
A general admission ticket is free, but some of the headline events require a pro pass and if you'd like to do some virtual networking and chat with other guests in the "Community Center," you'll also need that same pass. Here's the full agenda.
Resonance Consulting out of Vancouver has a new report out: 2018 Future of Millennial Travel. You can download a free copy here. Resonance does great work and really gets content marketing.
The first chapter immediately caught my attention, perhaps because it’s called, Cities are the Destinations. It talks about how big cities as a travel destination are a highly underreported tourism metric. Historically it’s been all about beach vacations and escaping.
According to their survey, Millennials (aged 20 to 36 years old as of March 16, 2017) are almost as likely to travel to a major city (38%) as they are to travel to a beach resort (40%) in the next 24 months. (I wonder where the mountains fit in.)
Also interesting is that this number increases when household earnings increase beyond $100,000. This subset of respondents is most likely to visit a major city on their next vacation (40%). It’s all about new experiences.
I’m not an expert on travel and tourism, but Resonance is calling this a sea change and a likely indicator that, in the near future, big cities will become the dominant travel destination. Is your city ready?
Photo by Nathan Ziemanski on Unsplash
Tourism Toronto launched a new campaign this week and with it came a great video that has been making the rounds online. It feels authentic. It actually feels like Toronto. Watch it here if you can’t see it embedded below.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS_tYWIoZzk?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
But why exactly is it a successful example of place branding?
Resonance (place branding consultancy) wrote a post about it and also spoke with Tourism Toronto’s EVP and Chief Marketing Officer. Here’s an interesting excerpt about the two things they wanted to achieve in the campaign/video:
“The campaign—and certainly this video—is trying to achieve two things,” Andrew Weir, Tourism Toronto’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer, tells Resonance. “First, international visitors tend to think of destinations by country, so we had to connect Toronto to the Canadian story.” He says the sprawling, wild country is still generally known for mountains, forests and wilderness, and Toronto wasn’t connecting to that narrative. Enter the “Canada’s Downtown” identity as a way to both incorporate the destination in a national context and differentiate from it. “Toronto is home of the country’s stock exchange, the center of media, the big sports teams are here, we have the long-run theater productions,” Weir rhymes off. “It is the urban center of Canada.”
The second objective for the campaign (and one held high throughout the commercial) was to be unabashedly proud of the city’s unique alchemy, diversity and inclusivity.
“We’ve seen the foundation for local pride laid by people and brands like Drake and the Raptors and we wanted to build on that, to separate ourselves from other cities. We tapped into that energy that’s embedded in Toronto’s identity and sense of place.”
Pride—and a devotion to inclusivity and openness—jumps off the screen. Given the current political direction towards closed borders and suspicion, the goosebumps pop often while viewing.
At the end of the day though, I think it comes down to the fact that it feels like it captures the zeitgeist of Toronto. As I said at the beginning of this post, it feels authentic. And good place branding doesn’t invent identity. It takes things that are already latent and then exploits them.
It’s either that or I just like seeing the Chinese food place I go to at 3am featured in a video.