City gives fests $250K to attract crowds in 2017
The city is spending $250,000 to help Ottawa’s homegrown festivals promote themselves to the thousands of tourists expected to visit Ottawa next year for Canada’s 150th birthday.
The money, announced Thursday by Mayor Jim Watson and the Ottawa 2017 Bureau, will be spent on a marketing and outreach campaign to promote dozens of Ottawa festivals. Special ambassadors will hit the streets during peak tourist season to let residents as well as visitors know what’s going on across the city, while digital content will be created to drive promotional efforts beyond 2017.
City officials hope to attract 1.75 million more visitors than usual to Ottawa next year, which could translate into more gate revenue for Ottawa’s established festivals, the mayor said. But that won’t happen if visitors don’t know there’s a festival happening somewhere.
Ottawa 2017 has already announced several of its “signature” events — Red Bull’s Crashed Ice, a two-day music festival, a multimedia show in a new downtown LRT station — but Watson says organizers are trying not to directly compete with established festivals, which generally happen at around the same time each year.
“There’s bound to be some overlap, but we’re trying to minimize that because we recognize the festivals are here today and they’ll be here tomorrow and we don’t want to harm them,” Watson said.
Guy Laflamme, head of Ottawa 2017, echoed the mayor’s comments.
“We’re not dividing the pie into smaller pieces, we are substantially increasing the pie into a mega-pie that will benefit everyone,” he said.
The not-for-profit Ottawa Festivals will manage the marketing campaign. Executive director Carole Anne Piccinin says the money will help make local festivals more visible in a year when many eyes will be on Ottawa.
“We’re here in 2017, we’ve been here for over 20 years and we will be here beyond 2017, ready and waiting with open arms to entertain and engage visitors,” she said.
She added that municipal investment in arts and culture can have a domino effect as it often helps festivals secure funding from corporate sponsors or other levels of government. Watson’s enthusiasm for 2017, for example, has already helped attract other funders and encourage investment in the city, Piccinin said.
“Municipal investment is key and it is a driver for provincial and federal funding,” she said.
As encouraging as the new marketing money might be, it comes after some in Ottawa’s cultural community felt shut out by the city.
The 2016 budget, approved in December, included an inflationary increase for cultural spending, but no additional investments in the council-approved plan for arts, heritage and culture. The six-year plan, approved in 2013, has only seen about one-fifth of the outlined $4.96 million in investments come through, according to the Ottawa Cultural Alliance.
The alliance has said the lack of new investments would limit the local cultural industry’s ability to leverage provincial and federal funding this year, which are critical in the lead up to 2017.
The city is spending about $6 million on its 2017 initiatives, though Watson said the bulk of the $250,000 marketing money comes from CIBC, Ottawa’s 2017 corporate sponsor.