Winter PSA Video
Tourism Vaughan launched a television PSA to help broaden the city’s awareness as an overnight, winter destination. The goal was to highlight Vaughan’s diverse range of offerings: from thrilling attractions to beautiful scenery, culinary excellence and plentiful shopping districts. This goal came out of a gap identified in the Vaughan Destination Master Plan, which is that Vaughan is seen as a day-trip market for only summer travel. In order to expand Vaughan’s tourism season and appeal to audiences who didn’t have Vaughan as a consideration, we utilized the vast impressions that a 30-second television PSA – much like a commercial – would provide.
This commercial PSA was live across Ontario and the Maritimes for 9 weeks between November to January, airing during Vaughan’s off-peak season to assist visitation numbers. The PSA aired a total of 15,291 times during this period. Since the video was created in-house, we made alternate formats of the video to utilize on our website, YouTube channel and on our Instagram account. In total, excluding the television impressions, this video PSA resulted in 3.7 million impressions and more than 485,000 views.
Since its launch, hotel occupancy rates for 2024 have been significantly up. Between January to April of 2024, the year-to-date average was 74.7 per cent, 3.3 percentage points higher than 2023’s 71.4 per cent average. Additionally, April had an 80.9 per cent occupancy rate, which is significant for a city that doesn’t have a unique seasonal strength for spring. This shows a promising trend of awareness of Vaughan as an overnight destination – rather than a simple day trip.
To solve the challenge that was Vaughan’s perception as a summer day trip, we leveraged Vaughan’s diverse tourism offerings to appeal to a very wide audience. We showed a different side of our city, and highlighted destination clusters that weren’t well-known to many outside of the 40 kilometre range.
The creativity in this project was predominantly based on its return on investment. While television commercials are exceptionally expensive, video PSAs are free. While there are constraints and guidelines that PSAs must adhere to in addition to what any commercial would have to do, free is hard to beat. It meant less control over the timing but resulted in over 15,000 airings.
While not just any kind of business can do a video PSA, a municipality can certainly benefit from this low-cost tactic to increase awareness. While used in this context for tourism, it could be used for a wide breadth of municipal needs, such as industry development, workforce initiatives and more.
With the budget that we had, we thought outside the box to provide a video PSA that brought Vaughan’s name and destination to the TV screen. Many municipalities have never considered television as a feasible option because of the cost – not just to advertise, but to also produce a commercial and develop the content. We came up with a way that cost us very little, utilizing our tourism assets’ own b-roll content, and leveraged multiple channels that made a simple video PSA a far broader tactic in brand awareness.
Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2OZ74tEZno
