Québec’s Ministère du Travail, de l’Emploi et de la Solidarité sociale (MTESS) is using Twitch and games associated with city building and engineering to draw younger people to the skilled trades.
In December, Québec announced an investment of $3.4 billion over the next five years to combat its labour shortage, some of which is earmarked to address the deficit in areas like IT and in the province’s booming construction sector.
And in its latest campaign, MTESS and agency partner Cossette produced a series of French language live broadcasts, getting well-known Twitch and social media influencers to hand over the reins of their channels to subject matter experts in the fields of IT, construction and civil engineering. The result is what Richard Rochette-Villeneuve, creative director at Cossette, referred to as a “kind of a conference with a video game in the background,” lasting more than 90 minutes, with pointed questions from the teen and young adult audience about certain fields.
“What I like about this idea is that it reaches youth in their natural environments – video games, Twitch, what truly fuels their passion,” he says.
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Minecraft was used to discuss careers in construction and woodworking, while recreating a Montreal neighbourhood in the SimCity-esque Cities: Skyline was used to promote jobs in civic engineering. The IT sector in particular has a lot of demand in Quebec, so one of the live broadcasts promoted careers in IT by showing how to code a video game from start to finish.
While the platform overindexes to men, he says that it deployed female influencers to generate an even gender mix.
Sister agency Cossette Media developed the media strategy and rollout of a supplementary campaign, with ad spend in line with past efforts. In addition to its activation on Twitch.TV, it includes online video and social media ads, content partnerships, a campaign website, and an influencer marketing strategy led by Citoyen.
The supplementary messaging in online videos is built around asking younger people about working in fields associated with hobbies they love, and delved into how skateboards are conceived and manufactured, diving into design, molds, and other considerations, and a media partnerships including Urbania and La Presse.
