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.