The conventional approach to tourism campaigns is to focus on the familiar and showcase attractions that are well known, in order to appeal to potential visitors.

Our idea was to use the power of surprise to showcase the incredible people, places and experiences that Ontarians DON’T know about.

We launched with a ten day teaser campaign using :60 second TV, video and social media (Facebook, Instagram) posing the question ‘Where am I?’ Intriguing, unfamiliar yet desirable content crafted in the form of riddles, drew people in and challenged them to answer the question without revealing the answer.

TV and social channels worked together to gamify the experience, driving consumers to WhereAmI.com to take a guess. A built in geo-guesser using Google Maps API created a virtual game of ‘hot and cold’ in kilometres. With a new clue being revealed each day, 1 in 3 users returned to the site, and of those users 48% came back twice.

Ten days later, we revealed that these incredible places and experiences were in fact in Ontario. We added cinema for impact as well as display and :15s video to the channel mix to increase depth and breadth to the campaign.

The power of surprise and intrigue surrounding this new and unexpected Ontario created a desire to find out more about the specific attractions and experiences presented in the campaign. We fulfilled that desire on ontariotravel.net where they could find all the details, and continue to explore more of what Ontario had to offer.

After the big reveal of Ontario, travel to and within the province increased:

• Overnight visits tripled.

• Summer trips nearly doubled.

• 1 in 309 Canadians from 480 cities played along, but only 13% got it right. Not even people in Ontario recognized Ontario.

• The campaign returned $7.23 cents for every dollar spent, and has now been launched across the US and the UK.