City launches fourth Seven Days with the Giant contest

The city’s Seven Days with the Giant has been a “wildly successful annual summer campaign” that continues to help move Thunder Bay forward as Canada’s best outdoor city, said tourism manager Paul Pepe.

The choose-your-own-adventure style contest launched Tuesday at noon; the fourth annual contest offers a seven-day all expenses paid trip to Thunder Bay worth about $15,000. It includes airfare, accommodation, camping gear and a digital camera package among other perks.

The prize for the first contest was a seven-day trip, but with activities scheduled for the winners; the contest has changed so that winners can choose their own schedule.

“They can pick and choose what they want to do to meet their own interests and physical abilities in terms of exploring outdoors,” said Pepe.

The contest has received more than 6,000 entries per year, most of them from North America, but there have been some entries from all over the world. Pepe said this year the city put ads for the contest magazines like National Geographic, Canadian Geographic, Explore and Canoe and Kayak.

“We’re using media sources, digital and in print, that reach targeted avid outdoor enthusiasts rather than through our traditional approaches,” said Pepe. “It’s a gateway to a lot of the fantastic opportunities that exist beyond the city limits.”

Contests like Seven Days with the Giant generate a lot of buzz around the city and Pepe said people love contests; they love to win something.

And the thousands of entries give them a database of avid enthusiasts to help define their marketing strategies in the future.

“It helps raise the profile of Thunder Bay as an outdoors community,” Pepe said. “It’s the fact we’re on the shore of the world’s biggest lake, that we’re minutes from boreal forest and we have this amazing natural environment around us but we also have this very eclectic, amazing urban culture fabric as well.”

The contest closes May 31 at midnight. Entrant’s names go into a computer database and the winner is selected at random.