The Out-of-Home Marketing Association of Canada (OMAC) has confessed to being behind this winter’s “Holiday Initiative” campaign, which saw billboards, bus shelters and digital spaces blanketed with ads asking Canadians to vote for a new holiday.

OOH ads on bus shelters featured a QR code leading to a page where users could vote on a name for a new holiday, and billboards led them to the campaign Facebook page.

Roseanne Caron, president, OMAC, tells MiC the idea for the campaign, which generated data on how QR codes, OOH and digital can work together, came from the project’s creative agency Open Creative, who remarked on how other countries have so many more holidays than Canada does. QR codes in the campaign were done by Crucial Interactive.

The campaign ran anonymously under the name “Holiday Initiative” in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver during the month of February when Canadians are typically being battered by the worst of what Mother Nature has to offer, says Caron.

“One of the interesting results was that the campaign seemed to be [most popular] with people in Quebec,” she says. “Because of the timing with Family Day in Ontario and Alberta there was a lot more activity as we were looking at the total numbers this morning. The French impressions were higher than the English ones, and the English campaign ran in Toronto and Vancouver, while the French ran only in Montreal.”

QR codes in the three cities generated nearly 4,300 scans, with an open rate of 69%, says Caron. The Facebook page saw 4,232 unique visitors throughout the campaign, with 1,225 “liking” the page.

“One of the big reasons we had for doing this campaign is there has been a lot of discussion about QR codes, some people believe they can be effective, some don’t, and we often look at what is being done in Asia and say we wish we could do what they do there, because they have had a lot of success,” she says. “We have had a lot of issues in North America in terms of educating consumers on how to use them, but also in having seamless platforms. Both of the platforms worked well together, if we had only used one platform we would have had less interaction with the campaign. Whatever is next, this shows that OOH can help deliver that interaction.”