Destination Canada — Canada’s tourism board — has capitalized on reactions to the Donald Trump presidency with a timely banner ad buy on the New York Times website Monday.
The ad says “It’s all found in Canada,” and it appears right above headlines about Trump appointing GOP chairman Reince Priebus as chief of staff and Breitbart leader Steve Bannon as campaign chairman.
It’s a timely ad for the company — plenty of Americans have publicly expressed their intention to move to Canada to avoid a Trump presidency. On Election Night last week, the Canadian immigration site temporarily went down.
A spokesperson for The New York Times claims that the placement wasn’t intentional.
“The Destination Canada ad that ran on the homepage of NYTimes.com on Monday was not timed to the election nor was it related to its outcome,” the spokesperson said.
Still, there are other companies doing the same: Go North Canada, a recruitment site for job seekers in technology, has also been running promoted tweets that appear to be targeted to Americans in the wake of the election. A similar ad was also running on Twitter during the primaries by Waterloo-based ad tech company Sortable.
Clever & timely. Will we start seeing brain drain in US? pic.twitter.com/WjqyBLOjLC
— Ana Milicevic (@aexm) November 14, 2016
A spoof ad offering “election insurance” for Americans looking to move to Canada also went live last week, and Business Insider said that its article on “How to move to Canada and become a Canadian citizen” was briefly its most-read on Tuesday night.
Air Canada is also running tourism ads offering a “test drive” for Canada; and earlier in the year, a local radio host from Cape Breton in Nova Scotia offered Americans the chance to move there in an effort to increase the island’s population. The Washington Post reported that the day after Election Day, the site saw 40,000 visitors in 24 hours.
Canada was named the best travel destination for 2017 by Lonely Planet Monday.
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