To kick start this campaign, we used a YouTube star, Merton, who became popular with his musical improvisations on Chatroulette, an ideal choice to ensure the viral effect we needed.

Communicating live with London, Paris, New York and Toronto, Merton recruited festival-goers and gave away 'golden lanyards'—a trip to Montreal and unlimited festival passes. A Facebook contest was added to win an additional trip. Twitter, Foursquare and Flickr were used to generate more buzz. Other bloggers were invited to create content; therefore, at virtually no cost, Festimania used social media to reach hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

Montreal Festimania was created in 2010, bringing together 11 festivals held in Montreal. The objective was to increase awareness about Montreal as a festival city in key tourist markets.Compared to Paris or New York, Montreal is not the first tourist destination that comes to mind. This could be considered a weak point at first, but a strength for our trendy target market. Although Montreal might be the underdog, Festimania has everything it takes to resonate with a young, hip demographic. Buzz for Festimania was created using word-of-mouth and free platforms integrated into our digital properties, fed by user-generated content.

We had $675,000 to unite all 11 festivals under one identity and launch it at the international level, without any media buy, except for a minimal investment of $15,000 in SEO.

a) Over 14m impressions in all types of media (La Presse, The Telegraph from London, Radio Canada live newscast on launch night, cultural blogs, etc.) b) 700,000 views of all the videos produced; more than 500,000 for Merton; 100,000 of which happened in the first 48 hoursc) 36 blog posts and 27 videos producedd) Over 9.7m potential impressions on Twittere) Over 250,000 Facebook page-views

Merton is a pianist-improviser who is a major success when it comes to social media. He was credible with young, connected people and was able to give them a memorable experience. His first YouTube video was seen over 8m times. He was the perfect choice to promote Festimania with wit, music and a style all of his own. Thanks to a strong identity, engaging content, a well-defined target and a strategy modelled after the target and Festimania, we succeeded in standing out both here and in the rest of the world.