MAC UNDER ATTACK
Moose Jaw ready to fight for mascot
For Jacki L’Heureux-Mason, Mac the Moose has become a unicorn.
She uses the term as marketing lingo. Mac has long been an asset for Tourism Moose Jaw, where she serves as executive director. But the buzz around his recent run-in with a roadside statue in rural Norway has turned him into something else: a unicorn, an exquisitely rare promotional opportunity that is always wished for, but hardly ever seen.
It must be seized, for both pride and profit.
“The struggle is real,” she said. “We have other places that we need to compete with.”
Moose Jaw is a destination. L’Heureux-Mason estimates that a typical Main Street shop gets more than half its business from tourism. Her job is to bring them still more attention, and Mac looks like the city’s ticket to a summer rush.
“With this being literally worldwide, my hope would be to see at least a 12- to 15-per-cent increase,” she said. “We are getting between 400,000 and 430,000 visits a year. If we can get that up to close to 500,000, I would consider this extremely successful.”
It all began on Jan. 11, when Regina-based internet personalities Justin Reves and Greg Moore shot a video near her office. What they said was nothing new. Four years ago, Stor-Elvdal, a regional municipality 230 kilometres north of Oslo, erected a moose statue both 30 centimetres taller than Mac and generally acknowledged to be aesthetically superior.
But what was different was the way they said it. Reves and Moore, who previously held senior positions at Regina ad agencies, challenged Moose Jaw Mayor Fraser Tolmie to find a way to put Mac back on top.
Both said they made their video unprompted, and did not reach out to Tolmie or any local authority before posting it online.
The mayor played along. So did the deputy mayor of Stor-Elvdal. Their warring words helped generate wave after wave of media coverage, with stories running in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, the Guardian, the BBC, Portugal’s Diario de Noticias, Germany’s Kieler Nachrichten and even the South China Morning Post.
“What’s insane for me is we made that first video 22 days ago and somehow it’s still being talked about,” said Reves. “We both know the media cycle moves quickly.”
L’Heureux-Mason said she usually considers a 72-hour cycle a victory. But the BBC was still booking Tolmie for appearances in mid-February. Over that time, journalists have written many thousands of words about Mac the Moose and his rival, known as Storelgen.
Andrea Lucarelli, a professor at Sweden’s University of Lund, calls it “the moose case.” He said it can be seen as an exercise in city branding, his area of expertise.
“Many cities have embraced this idea that they should treat themselves as brands and, therefore, they should try to boost their brand image, enhance their brand identity,” he explained.
Lucarelli said Moose Jaw and Stor-Elvdal are competing in much the same way two companies might, “to position themselves in a space that is not occupied.” There can only be one Big Mac, one iPhone, one Birkin bag — and there can only be one municipality with the tallest moose.
He compared it to battles between Urbino and Florence over which is the true home of the painter Raphael, or Copenhagen and Stockholm disputing the title of “capital of Scandinavia.” In the current competition, though, he acknowledged the stakes are somewhat lower.
“This is funny, because it’s about moose.”
While there can only be one champion, there are ways for each side to win. Lucarelli believes Moose Jaw and Stor-Elvdal have both succeeded from a “pure communications point of view.”
“Of course,” he said, “because who knew of those two cities otherwise?”
L’Heureux-Mason said she’s already seen concrete results. Requests for information are up at the tourist centre. Where Mac generally attracts only five or six photo shoots each day in the winter season, as many as 30 people are taking selfies with him daily, she said. Souvenir sales at the tourist centre gift shop are up about 30 per cent.
She measures her success in ratios. L’Heureux-Mason typically aims to get Tourism Moose Jaw’s social media posts shared at a rate of two to five per cent of the likes on its Facebook page. But Mac-related posts are getting shared at 300, 400, even 500, times the like count.
“It just took off and it hasn’t stopped,” she said.
Website views have gone up “dramatically.” Media stories look likely to translate into real visits. Of the roughly 2,000 comments she’s surveyed on the New York Times Facebook post on Mac, at least 50 said something like “if you Google this place, it’s pretty cool.”
Kristi Hirth of Ellington, Conn., wrote “road trip to Moose Jaw,” tagging one of her Facebook friends. Jennifer Rice tagged two, and commented “new travel destinations for the list!”
L’Heureux-Mason said it’s “beautiful” that the craze began “organically,” forming outside her organization. According to Lucarelli, grassroots campaigns operate differently than top-down marketing, though they’re not always more effective. Synergy seems to work best. Reves said the key ingredient is civic leaders ready to jump in and play along.
“Mayor Tolmie and his team, they’re full of energy and they’re really trying to do some great things in this city,” he said. “My hat goes off to them.”
L’Heureux-Mason has followed a careful strategy to hold the world’s attention: Identify the “loudest promoters” of Mac, and tap into their energy and influence. She’s posted far more frequently through Mac’s own Twitter account, @RealMacTheMoose.
“That was something we put a lot of time and effort in, having to retweet and come up with pithy little things that caught people’s attention,” she explained.
She said it was an “uphill battle” to deal with numerous fake accounts impersonating Mac.
Linda Otnes Henriksen, deputy mayor of Stor-Elvdal, has been trying just as hard to keep interest in Storelgen alive. Norway’s three largest newspapers have followed the story, and she’s been fielding calls from the international media.
“Everything kind of just exploded and it’s been non-stop ever since,” she said. “For us, a small village in Norway, this is huge.”
She said the village has painted moose tracks on its streets, and is trying to add more bilingual signage. They hope to get everything in place for the tourist season.
A national tourism group picked up the campaign, and a Norwegian architecture firm helped out. But as January turned to February, Henriksen noticed interest beginning to wane. She went three days without a call from the press.
“It settled down a little bit,” she said. “And we thought: how about a moose truce?”
Henriksen announced that she was planning a trip to Canada. It triggered a new round of media frenzy over the prospect of “peace talks.”
Tolmie’s office has remained in regular contact with her since to pin down the visit, which could lead to the eventual twinning of the two communities. But Tolmie told the Leader-Post he will not yield. “We’re not going to lose this battle …” he said. “I’d hate to see the country of Norway bankrupt themselves in this arms race.”
Norway has a sovereign wealth fund with more than US $1 trillion in assets.
Tolmie has taken risks to raise his city’s profile. He held two press conferences that could have gone badly, but didn’t. In the first, he read a statement the city attributed to Mac, in which the statue gave them “permission” to make him taller.
Even Reves said that seemed a bit “weird” at first. But it worked.
“Weird is how you stand out,” said Moore. “If you’re not interesting, you lose.”
Tolmie has stayed in touch with Reves over a group chat, which also looped in L’Heureux-Mason and the city’s communications chief, Craig Hemingway. They passed along the latest donation news and celebrated big media victories, like getting in the New York Times.
Hemingway doubts that the Mac phenomenon would have exploded quite like it did without Moose Jaw’s new marketing strategy. In October, the city organized a branding session with “international keynote speaker” Gair Maxwell. The event led to a committee that has since met for monthly branding and strategy meetings. It brings together representatives from city administration, city council, the Moose Jaw & District Chamber of Commerce, Tourism Moose Jaw, the Downtown Marketing Group, Visit Moose Jaw, business leaders and 15 Wing Moose Jaw.
According to Tolmie, the committee is trying to adopt a single voice to “tell the community’s story.” He takes that work seriously.
“I’m going to be very aggressive and market and promote my community because that’s my job,” Tolmie said. “We’re starting to see the fruits of our labour now.”
The campaign to boost Mac the Moose by at least 31 cm had raised $47,000 by the end of January, nearly enough to pay the estimated $50,000 cost of improvements. The city is bringing on an engineer to find a “feasible” plan. Tolmie said the goal is to reclaim the record in time for tourist season.
A big chunk of that money was announced at Tolmie’s second press conference, which brought still another partner on board. Moose Jaw and Stor-Elvdal hold no monopoly on the moose image, which is also the “icon” of New Brunswick’s Moosehead brewery.
“We heard about the story a few weeks ago,” said Trevor Grant, Moosehead’s vice-president of marketing and sales, during a Jan. 30 celebration at a Moose Jaw bar. “I immediately asked my team to put together a plan.”
At the press conference, where Tolmie described the moose as “noble,” “stately” and “majestic,” Grant announced that his company would donate $25,000 toward the cause.
“If we do get the media attention and awareness for the brand that’s certainly a great thing,” he said. “But I would always say, first and foremost, that was not our objective.”
He said Moosehead truly believes in Mac, and wants to help restore him to his “former glory as the world’s tallest moose.”
The media attention was nonetheless substantial, and the brand awareness uniformly positive. CTV ran footage of civic leaders, including Tolmie, wearing Moosehead hockey jerseys and clinking bottles of Moosehead beer.
“It doesn’t get much more Canadian than this,” said a CTV news anchor.
CBC ran a similar image, while Global carried a photo of L’Heureux-Mason, Tolmie, Grant and others holding a giant cheque made out to Mac the Moose.
Tolmie publicly thanked the company, and said there is “a connection between the Canadian people and Moosehead breweries.”
Grant said he’s planning still more trips to Moose Jaw. There will be sales meetings, and promotions. The buzz is already boosting the company’s good name in the community. Kevin Haakenson, owner of local pub Bobby’s Place, said he’s noticed a slight increase in Moosehead sales since the press conference.
But Grant reiterated that money is hardly the point.
“Any commercial benefit that comes with it as a spinoff is certainly a positive thing for us, for sure, but that wasn’t our main goal,” he explained.
The two men who started the fire said they feel much the same way, at least for now. Reves and Moore insist they’ve garnered no monetary benefit from the Mac the Moose episode.
“There’s been no benefit outside of more people understanding what we’re about and, you know what, we’re OK with that,” said Moore.
They’re playing the long game. Moore and Reves own a “social media marketing agency” called Pidgeon Social. It advertises business social sessions and social media audits, but both say they ’ve recently shifted to emceeing events. They create content for companies like Conexus and SaskTel.
Facebook also pays them to test new features on some of the live videos they stream through the platform.
“It’s certainly not lucrative, but we hope one day it is,” Reves said.
The attention that came with Mac’s publicity helped boost their brand. Moore said they’re now verified on Facebook. Reves said their eventual goal is to have “big national partners.”
He suspects Moose Jaw and Moosehead are doing far better, with the city, in his view, scoring “millions and millions of dollars” worth of earned media (something Hemingway confirmed is almost certainly true, though not yet easily verifiable).
But Reves doesn’t hold it against them.
“People will probably never believe that we’re doing it for the right reasons,” he said. “We want to bring people joy.”
Lucarelli agrees that branding is about more than souvenirs, or tourist visits, or return on investment.
For a community, it can mean something special to the people who live there.
“It tries to build a sense of belongingness,” he said, “a sense of pride.”
That was something we put a lot of time and effort in, having to retweet and come up with pithy little things that caught people’s attention.