To best capture the spirit of “The City of Festivals,” Tourisme Montréal create its own expert to weigh in: a language algorithm it trained using thousands of visitor reviews.

Those reviews form the basis of the destination marketer’s latest campaign, “The Ultimate Montréal Review,” which was developed with creative partners LG2. Featuring a flurry of statements about the city – not all of which are entirely grammatically correct – the campaign dials up the charm for a town that has often leaned upon its European roots and cultural cachet to draw guests.

“Montréal’s je ne sais quoi reflects the city’s many facets,” explains Sylvie Charette, chief marketing officer for Tourisme Montréal. “Last year, we showed the city from the viewpoint of Montrealers. This year, we let those who vacation in our beautiful city have their say, and their comments are as unique as the city’s essence.”

The campaign is anchored by a 90-second spot that reflects several of the algorithm’s interesting turns of phrase, which suggest “the people who live here have the style of the weekend,” and that the city has “a collection of suns.” Accompanying those statements are imagery that’s often more symbolic than literal, with bagels and bicycle wheels standing in for “suns,” for example.

“When we ask visitors to describe Montréal, they often use metaphors and images. We read hundreds of visitors’ comments, but instead of meticulously choosing a few excerpts, we combined the most frequently used themes and words to train an algorithm to describe the city,” says Jean-Christophe Diaque, copywriter at LG2. “The result is the ultimate portrait of the destination – a portrait that we then imagined creatively, as the city itself would.”

The campaign has rolled out across OLV, social and OOH, in Canada, the U.S. and France.