Best of CASE District II Award
 

Institution: University of Toronto

Title of entry: Entrepreneurship at U of T: The place to invent possibility

About this entry: In 2022, Collision – North America’s fastest-growing technology conference – returned to Toronto for the first time since 2019. We used the week-long event to promote the University of Toronto as the top place for innovation and entrepreneurship to an international audience, and we applied learnings from the pandemic to achieve our goal with a fraction of our 2019 budget.

Reaching our target audiences in cities like Boston, New York and San Francisco is expensive. In contrast, reaching them when they were already in Toronto for an event they were highly engaged in provided a strong return on investment.

We leveraged the university’s new brand expression, Defy Gravity, to showcase some of the university’s top research-based startups with bold photographs and direct headlines that highlighted companies that could only be launched at U of T.

In 2019, we spent $150,000 on digital and out-of-home ads promoting U of T’s innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem and our presence at Collision, generating 13 million impressions. During the pandemic, when Collision moved online for two years, we were forced to reduce our budget and find strategic ways to reach our target audience online only. We learned that by focusing on platforms that brought us the highest value, we could reach and engage almost as many people with a much smaller budget. In 2022, we spent $35,000 on digital ads and achieved over 9 million impressions – roughly 70 per cent of the results with just 23 per cent of the budget.