Markham: Canada’s Centre of Innovation

Purpose of Project (including anticipated outcomes)

Background: Collision Conference 2022, North America’s largest tech conference took place in Toronto, Jun 20-23. Over 37,000 attendees from global locations attended Collision. The attendees included fortune 500 companies, tech startups, investors, different levels of government representatives, academia, talent seeking jobs and anyone with a tech interest. As a centre of innovation and part of Canada’s 2nd largest tech cluster, The City of Markham had partnered with York Region at their Pavilion at Collision to promote the City’s innovation corridor and tech cluster.

In support of Markham’s promotional efforts, the economic development team recruited a local and well established multimedia vendor to help develop a one minute promotional video.

The anticipated outcome of the video:

• Attracted high foot traffic to the Markham booth accompanied by high viewing of video resulting engaging with business audience.
• High level of engagement with Markham EDO to learn more about Markham and the news and opportunities. As a result, Markham team gained 160 new business contacts/leads from having a presence at Collision.

Effectiveness / Meeting Objectives (if known)

• The marketing assets (promotional video, poster panel and postcard) are very effective visually at branding and communicating the key competitive advantages of Markham including
• Markham a global city
• One of the fastest growing and cultural diverse cities in Canada
• A knowledge economy powered by a robust tech and supported by 1500 tech companies and rich network of innovation corridor and business accelerator network to support a thriving tech start-up and scale-up community
• High quality of life supported by a new downtown, amenities and infrastructure
• Dense and global talent supported by local academic network including Seneca College and a new York University Campus
• Home to over 650 companies with headquarters in Markham
• Business audience expressed strong interest in Markham after viewing video and materials together have helped to transformed people’s understanding of Markham and our offerings – talent, innovation, quality of life, growth and investment opportunities.

Challenges & Changes made

• The challenge was a short time frame (1 month) to source the right local vendor to produce the marketing assets and the video. We were challenged to find a vendor that is not only experienced, talented but who had to be local that have a deep understanding of the Markham community to help with the design and production of a video that can best channel the essence and key value proposition of Markham visually.
• The other challenge is defining the creative direction and achieving the end goals for the video which was to creative a visual piece that is brief, dynamic (visually and high energy) with minimal text while successfully and accurately using visually imagery to depict Markham to be an innovative, modern, corporate, dynamic, culturally place to do business, invest and live.

Target Audience (demographics)

• The targeted audience for the marketing assets, in particular the video is a diverse base of people including: fortune 500 companies seeking to expand, SMEs, startups, entrepreneurs, talent, government representatives, students, investors seeking to invest, and relocate businesses and family residency to the City of Markham.

The sustainability of our project are two folds:

• Helping to sustain local economy and jobs through investing in local businesses, products and services was a priority for our Markham Economic Development team. We were purposeful in how we approach the design and development of the marketing materials in particular the video, which originated from from seeking specifically a local vendor to work on our marketing assets. We wanted to support Markham’s creative industries and employment by sourcing local talent.
• Creating a multi-purpose and reusable video as a promotional tool that can be used for different audiences and purposes. The video was produced not only to be used at Collision as a fresh marketing piece to promote Markham, but was also conceived as multi-purpose marketing tool that continues to be relevant/suitable for different promotional purposes including tradeshows, events, investment meetings with clients.