Tourism Winnipeg

If you build it...you get one awesome city What is economic development? It's a question posed to many organizations tasked with growing the economy of a city or province. There are plenty of explanations floating around but they can be quite complicated. Economic Development Winnipeg (EDW) came up with a unique way to simply explain what we do every day. To explain the building blocks of what makes a great city, we turned to a favourite childhood medium—Lego—and EDW's Digital & Content Marketing Manager, Tyler Walsh. In spring 2020, Walsh teamed up with his two sons to share Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's message to children about how they can slow the spread of COVID-19 in the form of a Lego stop-motion video. The video quickly became a viral sensation and racked up more than a million views across many social media platforms, as well as a shout out from the prime minister himself. It pushed the Walsh family back to the boxes to create a Lego thank-you message to front line workers, a tourism attraction spotlight for Tourism Winnipeg and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Canada Day message to kids. Building on that momentum, Walsh and our Marketing & Branding team got to work in fall 2020 to create another Lego stop-motion video. This time, it would target the next generation of city builders—students. Viewers could follow our main character through an imagined city as he learned how economic development amplified a city's advantages to help its businesses and people prosper. We featured some familiar voices as characters including our own President & CEO Dayna Spiring and City of Winnipeg Mayor Brian Bowman. We also worked with middle and high school educators to put together a teacher's toolkit, which included a lesson plan and activities to help their students better understand economic development. There were tips on how to create a stop-motion video using Lego so students could build their own great city. At the same time, we showed some love to our own awesome Spotlight 4:13 Average time on page Video views 385,654 YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn Engagement 2,710 Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn 3,311 Pageviews 2,948 Unique pageviews Website statistics city with a quiz and interesting factoids centred on Winnipeg. It was all pulled together and featured on the microsite, whatiseconomicdevelopment.com. We used International Lego Day and the concept, 'time to get 'schooled' in economic development' to drive interest and media attention. The reaction was overwhelmingly positive with pick-up from local media with an earned media value of $208,429.87. Perhaps one of the biggest accomplishments of this project was the positive feedback and accolades we received from economic development and government agencies right across Canada and the United States. 12 2020 Annual Report

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