From the Nominator

"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 (U of T) as the top place for innovation and entrepreneurship to an international audience and 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 providing 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 thirteen 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 nearly as many people with a much smaller budget. In 2022, we spent $35,000 on digital ads and achieved over nine million impressions—70 percent of the results with just 23 percent of the budget."

From the Judges

"The judging panel congratulates U of T for:

1. Using a major event to raise their profile; 

2. Soft launching their new brand identity; 

3. Well-executed and targeted creative; 

4. Use of industry-specific digital channels; 

5. Outstanding diversity, addressing Toronto's multicultural workforce; and

6. Incredible results despite reduced spend—the definition of working smarter, not harder."