Tourisme Montréal
Creating local audiences around the world
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Using Omni, we switched from "in market for travel" targeting to cookieless psychographic segmentation specific to each target country, so we could create and activate real activatable audiences from our base in Canada.

The opportunity

In terms of international travel hotspots, Montreal is still an up-and-coming destination. Although it has a strong reputation, the city is not at the top of travellers' bucket lists, nor is it a repeat destination for international tourists. Because of this, the city's international tourism office, Tourisme Montréal, does not have any solid first-party data to work with.

 Year after year, we had to identify potential visitors for each of our campaigns. However, in recent years, we've been able to leverage "in market for travel" targeting offered by major digital media, activated programmatically to efficiently target tourists in each target market.

This approach was successful, with Montreal seeing a constant increase in tourism from 2010 to 2019.

 However, with the end of cookies, new limitations placed on data collection in Europe (GDPR) and California (CCPA), and restrictions put in place by Apple (ITP), we needed to revisit our targeting approach.

Using Omni, we switched from "in market for travel" targeting to  cookieless psychographic segmentation specific to each target country. 

Business success

CR, EQ segments reproduced in Omni vs. standard targeting
+ 13 %
CTR, Semasio audiences vs. in-market audiences
+ 9 %
CPQV, Semasio audiences vs. in-market audiences
- 5 %
Our challenge
Over the past two years, Tourisme Montreal and Touché! carefully tracked the changing pandemic and rules around domestic and international travel. Certain logistical requirements, like the gradual reopening of borders and return of international flights, needed to happen before tourists could come back. But what about the mindset of tourists themselves? Were our segments still accurate in this post-pandemic new normal?
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Our approach

Environics Research Group developed a psychology-based Explorer Quotient (EQ) market segmentation system for Destination Canada and Tourisme Montréal. Instead of simply grouping travellers by age, gender or household income, EQ also looks deeper at people's social values and views of the world.

01

Custom psychographic segmentation

Environics Research Group also identified the volume of each segment for each country.

 We used this to effectively replace the "in-market for travel" segments that each tourist destination buys internationally.

 Thanks to this exclusive partnership with Environics, which was integrated directly into our Omni platform, we were able to make a mirror image of the segmentation developed for Destination Canada.

02

International targeting solution

We activated the various segmentations for each campaign in all target countries—without using cookies. This solution was possible thanks to Omni, which provided us with guidance for developing and activating our targets.

Montreal continued to see increasing tourism, and our campaigns became more effective, demonstrating the substantial power of Omni over the audiences offered by the major players in digital media.

03

Creating semantic audiences

To make our audiences even more relevant in the context of the pandemic, we used the Semasio feature in Omni, which builds semantic audiences based on specific content.

 Over the course of the last 3 years, we were able to use Semasio to continually measure travel appetite in each country and the related impacts of COVID-19. With this data in hand, we were able to evaluate the potential of each segment and seize more tourism opportunities in each market.

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