Case Study / Tourisme Cantons-de-l'Est
Tourisme Cantons-de-l'Est wanted North Americans to discover the Véloroute Gourmande, a 235-kilometer cycling route through Quebec where the stops are restaurants. We rode it with our dog in a trailer and made a film about it.
What we delivered
The Véloroute is 235 kilometers long with roughly 120 places to eat along the way. That is a lot to explain to somebody who has never heard of it.
So we made two things. A Reel for people who don't know the route exists, and a film for the people who want to know what it's actually like before they give up five days of vacation to it.
They do different jobs, and both of them belong to Tourisme Cantons-de-l'Est now. Here's what each one is and why it was built that way.
Canada Built a 146-Mile Bike Trail Where Every Stop is a Restaurant
Deliverable 01
We rode the route and filmed what happened. The average person watches nine and a half minutes of it, and two out of three of them are watching on a television rather than a phone.
That second part is worth sitting with. Somebody scrolling on a phone is filling a gap between things. Somebody who put the Véloroute up on the living room TV has given it their evening, and usually there is a second person on the couch. Cycling trips get decided by two people, and this is the format where both of them are in the room.
A hosted press trip gets a tourism board about a week of posts and then it's finished. This doesn't finish. YouTube will keep putting the film in front of new people for years, including next April, when somebody in Boston starts working out where to ride this summer.
The film is also on the Véloroute Gourmande YouTube channel, not only ours. YouTube has a setting that lets one video be published by two channels at the same time, so the same film appears on their page with their name on it. They didn't have to re-upload anything or come ask us for a copy. Their subscribers get it, the views count on their channel, and they can put it on their website or in front of their board whenever they want.
One film also covered two regions. The route begins in Montérégie and ends in the Eastern Townships, and four tourism organizations split the cost of the campaign. Because we rode the whole thing, every one of them got their part of the route on screen.
Deliverable 02
Fifty-six seconds, out three days after the film. We published it as an Instagram collab post, which means one upload appears on two accounts at once with both names at the top. It went live on the Véloroute Gourmande page and ours at the same moment.
The reason that matters is whose numbers it counts on. Every view, like, save and share landed on their account as well as ours. They didn't get a mention in somebody else's post. They got the post.
Views are the number people ask about first and the one that tells you least. The number we'd point at here is shares. Twenty-one thousand people sent this Reel to someone they know. Another eight thousand saved it.
People save something when they might actually do it, and they send it to a friend when they're thinking about doing it together. That's a different person from someone who watched a nice video and kept scrolling.
Their team then put paid media behind it, which was the right move. Paid spend goes further when it's pushing something people are already passing around on their own, and they had the organic numbers in hand to know that it was.
@chrisandsara_ + @veloroutegourmande