YouTube Canada has expanded its CNCPT program into Quebec in a bid to better foster its ties with Quebecois creators, with a major pop-up activation at Montreal’s Mural Festival loudly proclaiming its arrival to the province’s creative community.

The program, which was first launched last year in Toronto in partnership with The Weeknd’s creative incubator, HXOUSE, is YouTube’s effort to “strengthen the pipeline of creators and build a creative community” within the country, says Alyssa Whited, marketing lead for YouTube Canada. While YouTube is known “for the big, hallmark memes and videos that we know and love to watch,” she says, “there’s also an incredible amount of talent that exists specifically within Canada and in Quebec that we really want to nurture.”

In that spirit, the program has now launched in the Montreal market as well, with a specific focus on Quebecois voices. But to promote its arrival and make sure the province’s creative community avails itself of their services, YouTube had to build awareness.

Hence the Mural Festival activation, which incorporates a number of elements that showcase and profile Quebecois creators. These include creator merch markets and meet-and-greet events, as well as other opportunities to connect directly with potential fans and build communities around their channels. In addition, a dynamic mural created by recent CNCPT alumna Melissa Falconer accompanies the pop-up.

According to Whited, Mural was the perfect platform for YouTube both because of its reach – “everybody in the creative community, digital or not, comes to Mural,” she says – and because of its reputation.

“To be partnered with them gives us some validity in a market that really trusts them. We wanted to use this opportunity to build the brand of CNCPT in a way that feels quintessentially Quebec, and Mural absolutely knows what that is,” Whited adds.

In Toronto, CNCPT has played a role in helping to elevate emerging creatives via what Whited describes as a “three-pronged” approach – first, by providing them with access to entrepreneurs, businesspeople and fellow creatives at fireside chats and panel discussions where they can glean useful knowledge for how to run their own operations; second, through a series of open houses where creatives in the community are able to network with one another, cook up potential collaborations together, and have access to YouTube experts who can help them make their ideas a reality; and third, through its accelerator program, which Whited says takes 20 applicants twice per year through an eight-week, intensive creator curriculum.

YouTube will emulate this model in Quebec, but using Quebec-based talent for the chats and panels, and adapting the program to better address the bilingual and French language creator experience.

Connecting with Quebecois creatives and developing a pipeline for those voices on YouTube is a key priority for the company in Canada because it is “an inredibly rich and diverse creative community that focuses so much on content from the lens of being bilingual and French,” Whited says.

While there is no data specific to the Quebec market, statistics from Oxford show creatives on the YouTube platform alone contributed more than $2 billion to the Canadian economy in 2022. “That speaks volumes to the contribution that Canadian creators make in the country, so why wouldn’t we tap into that?” Whited asks.