Chatham-Kent’s mayor says the $3,500 spent to advertise the virtues of our municipality in Edmonton ad Calgary was money well spent.
The advertising was in response to an Alberta campaign that aired on radio stations across Ontario, including here in C-K, attempting to lure people to Alberta.
C-K Mayor Darrin Canniff said the municipality then opted to run some radio advertising of its own on Alberta radio stations in that province’s two main cities, extolling the virtues of living in Chatham-Kent.
“It was meant to create some positive PR for the community,” Canniff said. “I had seven news interviews, some in Windsor and the others in Calgary and Edmonton.”
He added that expats who live in Alberta heard the ads and saw the stories and sent e-mails to Canniff.
“It created some very positive PR,” the mayor said, adding the feed back and inquiries weren’t from former C-K residents. “The Why C-K website had several hundred hits from it.”
A good portion of those came from the Greater Toronto Area, Canniff added.
The municipality needs to continue to grow, he said.
“The bottom line is we need people to move here. In order to create more employment, we need more people,” Canniff said. “And employers always tell us they need people moving in.”
He said he believes that if more people in the GTA were aware of the benefits of living in Chatham-Kent, “we’d have a lot more people moving here.”
Affordable homes, job vacancies, and geographical location are all selling points for C-K. However, the municipality is competing with hundreds of other towns and cities across the province.
“It’s hard to attract people. We as a municipality can only do so much. We need to create a positive buzz out there,” he said.
