Montreal is ‘considered to be OMG’

If Tourisme Montréal’s spring campaign, currently running in the U.S., Canada and France, feels a little artificial, well, it’s supposed to. The marketing organization and its agency LG2 got some AI assistance for the new ads.

Last year’s campaign asked Montrealers to help promote the city. “This year, we let those who vacation in our beautiful city have their say. And their comments are as unique as the city’s essence,” said Sylvie Charette, chief marketing officer, Tourisme Montréal, in a release.

LG2 used AI to review and analyze thousands of visitor reviews of the city to create “The Ultimate Montreal Review”—a script to pitch new visitors this year.

As has been well-documented during the media’s extensive coverage of artificial intelligence in recent months, AI outputs can sometimes feel slightly off. But rather than correct those quirks, Tourisme Montreal and LG2 embraced them and kept them in the review—or, at least the ones that feel less AI creepy and more poetic. They include “Did you know the smile was invented here?” and “Montreal is perfect for humanity.” The spot ends with the line: “You’ll get it once you’re here.”

“The result, the ‘Ultimate Montréal Review’ campaign, is as infectious as the city’s summer vibe,” according to the release.

The campaign includes a 90-second video spot, 15-second videos, web content and local OOH.

Visitors to Montreal often use metaphors and images to describe the city, explained LG2 copywriter Jean-Christophe Diaque. “But instead of meticulously choosing a few excerpts, we combined the most frequently used themes and words to train an algorithm to describe the city. The result is the ultimate portrait of the destination, a portrait we then imagined creatively, as the city itself would.”

David Brown