Advertisement

Funny Nova Scotia billboards troll Torontonians online — long after they’re gone in real life

(Photo via Reddit)
(Photo via Reddit)

When you live in a city, you dont tend to visit the tourist-friendly attractions unless you have visitors from away.

For Torontonians with guests from Nova Scotia, those destinations include the CN Tower, the Hockey Hall of Fame and IKEA. (Many Nova Scotians bitterly rue the day Ikea left while simultaneously hoping it comes back).

So it was with some amusement that I recently spotted photos of the Toronto billboards for Nova Scotia on social media sites.

The ads tout the Maritime provinces natural attractions such as whale watching: We heard you have an aquarium. Thats nice.Another mentions the observation deck, highlighting the difference between the big citys tower and Cape Bretons natural beauty.

As a native Nova Scotian, Ive never gone whale watching or driven the Cabot Trail, but it sounds like fun and maybe the tourists have the right idea.

The billboards have recently gone viral, but theyre not new, says Mike MacKenzie, communications advisor with Nova Scotia Tourism. In fact they havent been in market since May 2014.

They were created just for the Toronto market to capitalize on the new aquarium, he says. We wanted to leverage the fact that there was a current event happening that was relevant to our natural product.The Ripleys Aquarium of Canada opened in October 2013.

While the targeted campaign was specific to Toronto, general creative ads were placed in other markets, said MacKenzie.

(Photo via Facebook/Z103.5)
(Photo via Facebook/Z103.5)

The creative platform was this notion of Take yourself there,says Shawn King, President and CCO of Extreme Group, the Halifax advertising agency that created the campaign. There were two meanings to the tag line, he says. Take yourself there mentally, when youre here and youenjoy the place, you can benefit from that type of experience. And the other portion is literally get yourself to Nova Scotia.

He also mentioned that another billboard directed Toronto highway drivers to tune into a radio station that played the sounds of Nova Scotia presumably while sitting in busy rush hour traffic.

The Extreme Group advertising agency recently lost the contract to Toronto-based agency DDB Canada.

MacKenzie says that the ads have gone viral on their own, that Tourism Nova Scotia wasnt behind it at all.

The campaign was successful when it was first launched, but Its so weird how this went viral after so long, it was literally weeks after we lost the account,King says. Wow, this is bittersweet.

Ontario and Quebec are important markets for Nova Scotia Tourism, as well as the North Eastern United States, and theyre also looking to expand internationally, says MacKenzie. Germany and the UK are important markets for us because theres direct air access from Halifaxwe know that's a big factor in how people choose to travel.