Short Courses in Animal Science

Canadian Meat Cutters Image  Enhancement

Through securing first stage funding from the National Beef Industry Development Fund (NBIDF) for $180,000 the Canadian Professional Meat Cutters Association (CPMCA) developed a campaign to recruit young Canadians into careers in the meat industry at all levels.  With the assistance of a strategic marketing and advertising firm a recruitment campaign aimed at 17-24 year olds was developed and the website for this program at meatspecialist.com is ready to launch.  The campaign includes branding, advertising, event marketing, an industry website and media relations. 

A second stage in the late winter and spring of 2008, the Canadian Professional Meat Cutters Association (CPMCA) ran a labour force recruitment advertising campaign in Western Canada to generate awareness among youth and other audiences of the job opportunities in the meat processing sector.   The advertising campaign was very successful in achieving its objectives, and provided a good return on investment to the project funders, not only in terms of recruitment results, but also awareness, positioning, and learning which will inform future initiatives.

Governments and agencies in Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan provided $512,000 funding for the campaign in the fall of 2007, based on campaign plans, strategies and creative approach developed by the CPMCA in 2006. Work on campaign execution began in November 2007. The campaign began running in March 2008. The campaign came to a close in late-May 2008, though residual online and print media ran into June 2008.

Primary goals

  • raise awareness of meat processing as a career option,
  • attract  qualified new recruits into the sector, and
  • test and prove the proposition that with funding a campaign could succeed in driving qualified traffic of potential recruits to the web site, which in turn can deliver candidates to employers and colleges.

Core Strategy

The core strategy of the campaign was to use advertising to drive traffic to the meatspecialists.ca (meatforce.ca) web site, where information would be provided on the sector, on jobs currently available, and on training options.

Measurement and evaluation

Measurement and evaluation were key components of the campaign.  The goals in this area were to accurately measure campaign success against campaign objectives, and make intelligent recommendations to guide future campaign development and evolution. Care was taken to create a measurement framework that could adequately provide substantive and valuable feedback.

The campaign ran as follows:

Four Week Spike Campaigns

Alberta – Mar 2 - 31

Calgary Transit, Calgary Radio, Edmonton Transit, Edmonton Radio, Red Deer Radio 

BC – Vancouver – Mar 24 – Apr 21

Vancouver Area Ethnic Print, Radio and Transit

Saskatchewan – Apr 21 – May 19

Saskatchewan Rural Radio, and Rural Papers (Weeklies) in four rural communities

Four Month (20 wks) Sustain Campaign

Print ads in West Can targeted pubs – eg. Western Producer, Youthink

Web and online Advertising – Facebook, Monster.ca, MSN

Results

The bottom-line, big picture is that the campaign was phenomenally successful in achieving its objectives. The results have been dramatic, measured largely by web site analytics.  Some highlight results include:

  • Unique visitors to the recruitment web site have increased by a factor of 10 or 1000%
  • The campaign has driven 13,797 unique new visitors to the site.
  • Pages on the site were viewed 54, 885 times by 92% new visitors, meaning there were at least 50,500 unique pageviews of the site during the campaign

Conclusions

The campaign results yields several high-level conclusions:

  • The Meat Force website functioned extremely well
  • The advertising worked
  • Advertising is most effective in larger markets
  • The advertising may have to work harder in future to change minds
  • The campaign has longevity
  • The campaign spilled into other, non-targeted markets

Preliminary recommendations

Preliminary recommendations about moving forward with additional recruitment campaigns include:

  • Baseline surveying should be undertaken
  • More work needs to be done to address existing perceptions
  • In addition to additional recruitment campaigning, the sector should invest in a longer-term strategy
  • Invest in the creation of a more robust, self-sustaining web presence
  • Further investigate recruitment practice and job offering

The CPMCA is reviewing the results and findings of this campaign and will be in contact and consultation with industry, government and education partners regarding future steps.

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