Tourisme Montréal and LG2 Used an Algorithm to Capture the City’s ‘Je Ne Sais Quoi’

With the city about to burst into summer, Tourisme Montréal, in collaboration with LG2, took an innovative approach to capturing the city’s unique energy. To be as authentic and objective as possible, thousands of visitor reviews of the city were collected, analysed and used to train an algorithmic model. This resulted in some rather charming, grammatically quirky impressions of Montréal. The result, the Ultimate Montréal Review campaign, is as infectious as the city’s summer vibe.

“Montréal’s je ne sais quoi reflects the city’s many facets. Last year, we showed the city from the viewpoint of Montrealers. 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.

Launched earlier this spring in the U.S., Canada and France, this campaign includes a 90-second video spot, short 15-second videos, web content and local OOH advertising. Here’s a sample of the algorithmic-generated poetry from visitor comments used in some of the campaign’s pieces: Montréal is perfect for humanity. Did you know the smile was invented here? Montrealers are non-stop festivals.

Jean-Christophe Diaque, copywriter, LG2, said: “When we ask visitors to describe Montréal, they often use metaphors and images. We read hundreds of visitors’ comments. 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.”