Evidence of meeting #29 for Canadian Heritage in the 40th Parliament, 3rd session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was money.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Senior Vice-President, Marketing Strategy and Communications, Canadian Tourism Commission
Our focus is really on a couple of markets--Beijing and Shanghai. These are what the Chinese themselves call tier-one markets, with the most amount of revenue. There are direct flights to Canada. People in those specific cities have the highest propensity to travel to Canada.
Senior Vice-President, Marketing Strategy and Communications, Canadian Tourism Commission
Correct.
Bloc
Carole Lavallée Bloc Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC
And what did you do with the remaining $5 million?
Senior Vice-President, Marketing Strategy and Communications, Canadian Tourism Commission
That will be distributed through what we call our core markets. These are the traditional markets that we've been marketing to for 75 years, in some cases. They include the U.K., France, Germany, and Australia, in particular. It will leverage the awareness of the Olympic Games and the impact the games had on people's understanding or knowledge of Canada.
The Olympic Games, of course, were a huge commercial for not just Vancouver and British Columbia, but for all of Canada. It will leverage the awareness and interest in Canada they saw from the games and turn it into actual customers to Canada.
Bloc
Senior Vice-President, Marketing Strategy and Communications, Canadian Tourism Commission
We have a very sophisticated model to help us understand which customers to go after. We look at travel values, which really focus on why people travel and not necessarily where they travel. Roughly speaking, these customers are higher educated, have higher levels of income, have a penchant to travel internationally around the world, and are very intrigued by Canada.
Senior Vice-President, Marketing Strategy and Communications, Canadian Tourism Commission
Our objective is really conversion of these customers. In our post-games strategy, our objective is to get these people on planes and into Canada in particular.
It's as simple as that. It's conversion.
Bloc
Carole Lavallée Bloc Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC
I don't know whether this is what you said, but the translation was that your objective is to bring people to Canada.
Senior Vice-President, Marketing Strategy and Communications, Canadian Tourism Commission
Correct.
Bloc
Carole Lavallée Bloc Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC
Yes, I know and hope that to be the case. That is the bare minimum.
Senior Vice-President, Marketing Strategy and Communications, Canadian Tourism Commission
It's not an unreasonable question, because prior to the Olympics one of our objectives was to really leverage the broadcasters who were here covering the games to tell the Canada story. So our objective was really about relationships with all of those broadcasters, like NBC, TV5, and BBC, to help them distribute our content and information to tell the story of Canada. But really, it's post-games that's bringing them here.
Bloc
Carole Lavallée Bloc Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC
But when you talk about extraordinary experiences, you have to identify them. Which ones do you choose?
Senior Vice-President, Marketing Strategy and Communications, Canadian Tourism Commission
We choose a variety of experiences. It depends on how we market them. We do a lot of marketing through media. Our media website has hundreds and hundreds of story ideas. It has what we call B-roll, with images that reflect what the story is trying to tell. It has other images that we can get media to pick up, create a story, and broadcast for their viewers.
We use social media very extensively. So we use a variety of experiences from across Canada, but in particular those that best reflect our brand and the kinds of customers we're going after.
Bloc
Carole Lavallée Bloc Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC
You say that you choose them. When you tell people about the experiences they can have in Canada, what experiences do you describe?
Senior Vice-President, Marketing Strategy and Communications, Canadian Tourism Commission
It really depends on the target audience we're going after.
Senior Vice-President, Marketing Strategy and Communications, Canadian Tourism Commission
We've had some great success out of Churchill, for instance. Polar bear viewing in Churchill really captured the imagination of many of our broadcasters. We had a number of stories about Churchill. NBC came up and shot their own story about Churchill and broadcast it all across the United States.
We have a website with polar bears on our website. We thought one of those experiences would be very intriguing to our international customer base, and it turned out to be true. In fact, after the stories were broadcast, all the websites crashed that had anything to do with polar bear viewing in Churchill.
That's a great example, but we have lots of examples like that from other experiences across Canada.
Bloc
Carole Lavallée Bloc Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC
Do you primarily talk about the outdoors? Is your focus the outdoors?
Senior Vice-President, Marketing Strategy and Communications, Canadian Tourism Commission
No. That's part of the focus, of course, because Canada is famous for its great outdoors. But we try to add some context to those outdoor experiences, because they can appear to be intimidating at times to some of our travellers.
We have a very sophisticated culture, and we have very sophisticated cities. We have other kinds of journeys and experiences. So while we are famous for our outdoors, as we're all quite aware, we live in a society that is far more sophisticated than the average traveller might think.
Bloc
Carole Lavallée Bloc Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC
I don't know whether you have looked at the Marquee Tourism Events Program, but when you see the results province by province, it is clear that all the provinces lost money except British Columbia, or Vancouver, really, since you were given $8 million. Furthermore, the CTC moved to Vancouver.
Is there a desire to focus more on promoting Vancouver to Asian populations? Is that the direction the CTC is moving in?
Senior Vice-President, Marketing Strategy and Communications, Canadian Tourism Commission
No. We are the Canadian Tourism Commission. We happen to be located in Vancouver, British Columbia, but our focus is very much on Canada.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Michael Chong
Thank you, Ms. Lavallée.
Mr. Klassen, would you care to answer Madame Lavallée's question as to why the Canadian Tourism Commission moved from Ottawa to Vancouver?