POST AND BEAM
How to sell Canada abroad? For Liberals, the solution is social media.
Donald Trump may be fond of social media, but so is Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, pouring more than $13 million into sponsored posts on Facebook, Twitter and other digital platforms since it came to power.
While that’s an impressive amount of money — far more than the government spends on newspapers and magazines, for instance — it’s also fascinating to see who the government is trying to reach. “I have long said that if archeologists of the future want to understand the late 20th century, they could do worse than to look at advertising,” Trudeau said to me in an interview in 2016.
The same is obviously true of the 21st century. This week, CTV revealed what reporter Rachel Aiello found when she went digging through 1,500 pages of adspending documents recently released by the federal government.
The analysis shows a government heavily interested in talking to people outside Canada — almost half of the social-media ad budget targeted at travellers, whether tourists or newcomers.
Destination Canada, a Crown corporation set up to promote tourism to Canada, spent $4.3 million on social media posts, a lot of them directed at potential American visitors, according to CTV’s analysis.
“Among them were posts about the ‘Connecting America’ marketing program that was targeted at potential U.S. travellers,” CTV reported, as well as “a package of sponsored posts aimed at potential travellers in Australia, France, Germany and the U.K.; as well as various other sponsored posts targeting people in Brazil, Korea, Mexico and Japan.”
The second-biggest spender was Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, pouring nearly $1.5 million into two big campaigns on social media.
One campaign was all about informing newcomers to Canada about settlement services they could obtain for free, such as help finding employment. The other was to promote a new entry requirement for visa-exempt foreign nationals travelling to or through Canada — the Electronic Travel Authorization (eTA), as it’s called.
Social media advertising was a big part of the federal Liberals’ campaign to win power in the 2015 election, so it’s not a big surprise to see them using it in government, too. It may have been the game-changer in that campaign, as we saw when the election-spending figures came out a year ago. Liberals poured most of their money into digital advertising in that epically long election campaign, the numbers showed, while the Conservatives put their money (literally) on reaching voters through phone-dialling services.
Presumably we won’t see a lot of that in the next campaign — who answers the phone anymore?
One form of 20th-century media is still dominant in the government ad world — television, though how long it will prevail is an open question.
Though TV still gets most of the government’s ad budget — 51 per cent in 2015-16, according to the latest annual report from Ottawa — internet advertising has been quickly catching up.
“Whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram — or the traditional interview, press conference or scrum, which happen all the time — it is important for our government to connect with Canadians on platforms with which they are increasingly familiar,” JeanLuc Ferland, spokesperson for the president of the Treasury Board of Canada, told CTV this week.
Sure enough, lots of the social media posts would fall into the category of public service announcements, especially the ones that came from Health Canada, on subjects ranging from cannabis education to how to survive in extreme cold. But as the figures show, it isn’t just Canadians with whom the government is trying to connect. Almost from the moment he came to power, Trudeau has demonstrated a keen interest in promoting his “brand” abroad, whether through frequent travel out of the country or all those interviews granted to foreign media outlets.
The CTV analysis reveals a government also setting its advertising sights abroad, much like the PM now in charge.
Government advertising and tourism have always been intensely connected. Some of the 20th-century pioneers in political advertising — Dalton Camp, an ad guru for the Conservatives, for instance — were rewarded for their election work with lucrative government contracts to promote Canadian tourism.
However, what’s different about advertising in the 21st century is that it works two ways. When the government advertises on social media, it is able to collect information about people at the same time it’s transmitting it. Now, that data would be interesting to see.
Maybe that’s what data archeologists of the 21st century can go digging to find out next time — not just what the government is trying to say to people in its advertising, but what it’s learning about the people who see the ads.