We Saved You a Seat
This week, at the Roxy Theatre, we showed our members, partners, media, and the people who appeared in the films what more than a year of work became.
This premier belongs to all of them and today, it belongs to the world.
The campaign is called We Saved You a Seat. I want to tell you how we got here, because the story of how this campaign was made is inseparable from what it's saying and what it's inviting.
For more than a year, we asked people what makes Saskatoon compelling. Visitors. Members. Our own team. People who moved here and people who never left. People whose families have been here for generations. We asked the question in a lot of different ways and got the same answer every time.
Not a building. Not an attraction. Not an event, though our events are extraordinary. It was always a person. Someone pulling out a chair at a game so a stranger could sit. Someone inviting people they barely knew home for dinner.
That happened to me. Weeks after I moved to Saskatoon, a colleague invited me to her family's home in Elbow. I hardly knew her. It is one of the most generous things anyone has done for me, and I think about it often because now I'm the one extending the invitation.
Hospitable people exist everywhere. Warmth exists in many places but, there is something particular about what happens here. There is a genuine and unhurried opportunity to feel what it means to belong. To feel kinship. And it isn't even just with people. I spent thirteen years as a tour guide in the Canadian Rockies, standing more than 150 times on the Athabasca Glacier along the Icefields Parkway; that enormous river of ice that feeds the South Saskatchewan.
I built a deep relationship with that glacier and now, living on the banks of the river it feeds, I feel something synchronistic in that. A continuity. A belonging that goes beyond a postal code. All we are is our stories, and the origin story of this campaign is rooted in the stories of this destination. Stories so alive they were already being told before we arrived to listen.
We didn't write this campaign. This is Saskatoon's heart vocation.
There is so much energy here. With the scientists and engineers moving discoveries in nuclear medicine and potash innovation that feed the world. With the chefs serving a bison tallow egg on a brioche bun made from locally grown red fife wheat. With the Indigenous elders passing down ancient oral histories, and with a locally made star blanket draped over an Olympic athlete on a world stage.
This is not a tourism story that lives apart from the industries and communities that built this place. It lives inside them. It is their story too.
The organizing idea is the seat. Not one seat. All of them.
There was a moment in our boardroom with our creative team where we spent considerable time debating which chair should appear in the film. Which chair was the right chair. I thought we had lost the plot. We hadn't. What I understood in that room is that there is no single chair and that's the entire point.
There's the chair a visitor sits in when the trip turns out better than they expected, in a place they assumed had nothing for them. The table a local owner fills on a Tuesday night in February. The seat an athlete looks up at from the floor and finds a full arena of cheering fans and, this September, an artist on a stage at Country Music Week looking out at a room of Canadians on their feet during the CCMA Awards, right here in Saskatoon. Every one of those seats changes something for the person in it, and for the people who filled it.
What we made is a 90-second hero film with cutdowns at 60, 30, and 15 seconds; six visitor profile short films including a business delegate, with more on the way; and a behind-the-scenes film called The Chair. We also built an entirely new photography library shot here in June. The creative strategy came from William Joseph, production from Cinescapes, photography from Jig Creative. The campaign lives on Meta, Google Display, YouTube, Google Search, and at the Calgary Airport, carried through four content pillars.
Then, there is the yellow chair. The Cinescapes team built a physical installation that will appear across the city. A seat that invites people to sit down and share what this place means to them. The text reads: We've saved you a seat. Now tell us about yours because the campaign doesn't end with a film. It opens a conversation. Those stories will travel into trade shows, global publications, marketplace presentations, and the offices of international travel partners. As we export these stories, we import new energy, new investment, and new dollars into this community. Tourism is Saskatchewan’s fourth largest export industry.
None of this exists without Saskatoon's Best Hotels. A number of our hotels choose to invest in destination management and marketing through the Destination Marketing Program, not all of them, and I want to be precise about that. Every business in this city connects to the visitor economy that investment builds. The restaurants that fill on event nights, the retailers who see new foot traffic, the transportation networks that stay employed, the small and medium enterprises that need a vibrant, people-filled city to thrive in, and the global companies headquartered here that need that same vibrancy to attract and retain talent.
Learn more about the hotels who made this possible at saskatoonsbesthotels.com. Their investment is what makes it possible for Discover Saskatoon to compete in leisure, business events, sport and major events, and international travel trade against cities with larger budgets and longer runways. We compete on how this city makes people feel. This campaign is the proof of that, and it will keep proving it.
The assets are yours. We built a partner toolkit so this campaign can travel further than our media buy alone. The films, the photography, the content pillars belong to this community and to our partners around the world. Use them. Share them. Let them work inside your own channels.
We will soon be meeting with the broader business community to invite everyone — not just tourism partners — to leverage this platform and keep inspiring people to live, work, play, and learn here.
A campaign carries more weight when the whole city carries it.
We are stewards of the Destination Marketing Program. We are stewards of this destination and of its stories — and what an extraordinary honour that is. Our job is to breathe life into these stories so they live on, so they don't disappear, so they reach people who haven't yet found their seat here. All we are is our stories and this city has more of them than it knows what to do with.
The seat is waiting. We hope you'll pull one up.
What's your view from here?
Stephanie Pocha
As the CEO of Discover Saskatoon, Stephanie's responsibilities transcend the boundaries of traditional leadership. At the core of her role is the pursuit of championing Saskatoon's unique identity on the global stage, bridging its historic legacy with contemporary aspirations.
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