2021 Winner
SilverBest Cultural Insights
SilverBest in Travel and Tourism
BronzeBest in Location-Based Marketing
Destination Canada
"Journey Jam"
Initiative Media
"Journey Jam"
Initiative Media
Canadians crave cultural experience and often that takes them abroad. Roughly half of Canadian travel searches on Expedia are for international travel, and Canadians spend over $36 billion on travel outside of Canada each year. Simply put, Canadians love leaving Canada, and they take their
money with them.
To help restore some of this lost economic revenue, the agency looked into what experiences get Canadians to travel. That’s when they discovered something unique about their audience: over 3.7M Canadians have travelled over 100 kilometres for a live music concert, and Google search interest for concerts in Canada hit an all-time-high in 2019.
Music is an essential experience for Canadians and one of our chief cultural exports globally, but it’s also a very personal experience. The concert that gets your neighbor to travel may not matter much to you. So in order to harness music effectively to drive travel, they knew they’d have to cater it to individual listening habits. They created a first-of-a-kind travel recommendation engine based on an individual's musical listening preferences.
They mapped thousands of concert listings across the country using SongKick (an API for concert listings) and built Journey Jam to provide travel recommendations for concerts taking place outside of a listener's city on Spotify.
Love country music and live in Toronto? The Journey Jam engine would dynamically serve you upcoming shows featuring country music artists in Montreal, encouraging Canadians to join the community of musical travellers.
A first-to-market execution for Spotify, the Journey Jam engine combined data sets from Spotify and Songkick to provide actionable travel recommendations based on a listener's musical preferences.
Journey Jam's recommendation algorithm combined user listening history, geo-location, and language preference data from Spotify and upcoming concert listings from SongKick to serve a listener the right ad. Serving listeners the right ad was only part of the challenge. They also needed to create a seamless experience in order to capture intent. The ads drove to a dynamic hub that featured a curated listing of upcoming concerts based on a listener's preferred genre of music, playlists of new local music to discover along with background on the musical history of the area. Interested listeners could even click to book concert tickets using the SongKick platform helping ensure that they closed the sale.
With concert tickets booked, the only thing left was to travel. Journey Jam reached millions of Canadians across the Spotify platform and made over 31,000 travel recommendations based on musical preferences, ultimately connecting the right people with the right concert listings and presenting an opportunity to seamlessly book.
Destination Canada’s Journey Jam represented a bold step forward for travel content built around music and gave Destination Canada a new, relevant platform to share Canada’s narrative. Users spent an average of 25-30 mins listening to the playlists, falling in love with local music from somewhere new in Canada. Time spent with the microsite was +37-50% against platform benchmarks. There was a +23 Ad Recall lift and a +13% lift in Domestic Travel Search YoY. There was also an increase in Travel Bookings +14.4% YoY (an equivalent of $2.1 billion in online travel bookings for Canada that would have otherwise been spent outside of the country).
money with them.
To help restore some of this lost economic revenue, the agency looked into what experiences get Canadians to travel. That’s when they discovered something unique about their audience: over 3.7M Canadians have travelled over 100 kilometres for a live music concert, and Google search interest for concerts in Canada hit an all-time-high in 2019.
Music is an essential experience for Canadians and one of our chief cultural exports globally, but it’s also a very personal experience. The concert that gets your neighbor to travel may not matter much to you. So in order to harness music effectively to drive travel, they knew they’d have to cater it to individual listening habits. They created a first-of-a-kind travel recommendation engine based on an individual's musical listening preferences.
They mapped thousands of concert listings across the country using SongKick (an API for concert listings) and built Journey Jam to provide travel recommendations for concerts taking place outside of a listener's city on Spotify.
Love country music and live in Toronto? The Journey Jam engine would dynamically serve you upcoming shows featuring country music artists in Montreal, encouraging Canadians to join the community of musical travellers.
A first-to-market execution for Spotify, the Journey Jam engine combined data sets from Spotify and Songkick to provide actionable travel recommendations based on a listener's musical preferences.
Journey Jam's recommendation algorithm combined user listening history, geo-location, and language preference data from Spotify and upcoming concert listings from SongKick to serve a listener the right ad. Serving listeners the right ad was only part of the challenge. They also needed to create a seamless experience in order to capture intent. The ads drove to a dynamic hub that featured a curated listing of upcoming concerts based on a listener's preferred genre of music, playlists of new local music to discover along with background on the musical history of the area. Interested listeners could even click to book concert tickets using the SongKick platform helping ensure that they closed the sale.
With concert tickets booked, the only thing left was to travel. Journey Jam reached millions of Canadians across the Spotify platform and made over 31,000 travel recommendations based on musical preferences, ultimately connecting the right people with the right concert listings and presenting an opportunity to seamlessly book.
Destination Canada’s Journey Jam represented a bold step forward for travel content built around music and gave Destination Canada a new, relevant platform to share Canada’s narrative. Users spent an average of 25-30 mins listening to the playlists, falling in love with local music from somewhere new in Canada. Time spent with the microsite was +37-50% against platform benchmarks. There was a +23 Ad Recall lift and a +13% lift in Domestic Travel Search YoY. There was also an increase in Travel Bookings +14.4% YoY (an equivalent of $2.1 billion in online travel bookings for Canada that would have otherwise been spent outside of the country).
Credits
Destination Canada (Client Team):- Marketing Team, Destination Canada
Initiative Canada (Media Agency):
- Chris Gairdner - Head of Content
- Samantha Rosenberg - Manager, Content
- Ryan Gentile - Senior Project Manager
- Olivier Leblond - VP, Client Advice & Management
Spotify (Media Partner):
- Cari Rotstein - Client Success Partner
- Annie O’Brien - Client Solutions Partner
- Chad Beamish - Senior Client Partner
Red Apple (Production Partner):
- Andrew Lane - Senior Account Manager
- Johannes Vuorensola - Senior Technical Manager
Cossette (Creative Agency):
- Myriam Veilleux - Director, Business Lead
- Valentin Roux-Dufort - Strategic Planner