Patiolicious – Taste & Toast to Collingwood’s Great Outdoors
EDAC Category : Single Advertisement
Promoting Collingwood ‘Patiolicious’ – Taste & Toast to Collingwood’s Great Outdoors
- Objectives of the program
Patiolicious was created in 2020 in the early days of the pandemic to help the thriving Collingwood restaurant industry survive. It also served as a morale booster for the community providing residents an opportunity to pull together, support local businesses and socialize safely. So successful was the 2020 program, we repeated it in 2021, and again in 2022.
The primary objective of the program was to promote outdoor dining at local restaurants and help them adapt to survive financially through the pandemic. We achieved this with all 23 of 24 of the participating restaurants remaining open for business.
The program minimized the complexities of pivoting to an outdoor dining model during a pandemic by providing a guidebook for restaurants to adapt to public health requirements, removing bureaucratic obstacles and accelerating response times by coordinating all municipal departments that were acting in concert to support the program. Additional support included small grants to decorate their patio spaces and promotional campaigns across mainstream and social media platforms to promote the program and drive traffic to participating venues.
Restaurant feedback indicated that the program was instrumental in the success of their patio ventures – providing more traffic through promotion than any individual business would have been able to independently. Our secondary objective was to foster a sense of collective effort among Collingwood residents and visitors by encouraging them to come together to support local businesses, and begin visiting patios as soon as public health allowed it. Animation and decoration transformed new patios into fun and whimsical spaces in the downtown core. The 2020 strategy to reach restaurant owners was smaller scale and relied on our partnership with the Collingwood BIA by connecting with each of them to offer support, funding and clarity around guidelines offered through the Safe Plate guidebook.
- 2021 and 2022 Patiolicious Programs
As said, the 2020 Patiolicious program was so successful, we repeated it in 2021, and again in 2022, adapting and improving it with what we had learned along the way. With engagement of more than 220,000 people online – social media impressions alone demonstrate the enthusiastic participation of guests and restaurants alike.
The initial reach of the program in 2020 included only independently owned restaurants and was concentrated in the downtown. To expand the number of participating businesses, the 2021 and 2022 programs broadened the geographic footprint to include locations outside of the downtown core, increasing to 31 restaurants including franchise and chain outlets providing options for all budgets.
- SINGLE ADVERTISEMENT SUBMISSION
Collingwood residents and visitors from the GTA – are targeted through a variety of advertising campaigns leveraging several social media platforms, local newspapers (The Owen Sound Sun Times and Collingwood Connection), billboards on local two local highways (HWY24 and HWY26), 4 on-street kiosks, curbex mobile signs, radio ads and Video ads.
Submitted via WeTransfer is the primary published advertisement (Patiolicious-Primary-Published 2022.pdf) we have adopted for Patiolicious 2022, the content for which we repurpose and revise from year to year for the various platforms and enjoy budget savings as a result.
Thank you for your consideration.
