A branding expert recently told Vice News that Canadian rapper Drake generates about 5% of Toronto’s tourism industry.
“We did some calculations that suggest that he’s worth C$440 million [$333 million] to the Toronto economy,” Gordon Hendren, a marketing and branding consultant who founded Charlton Insights, told Vice. “Why? Because he’s helped to rebrand the city. He’s kind of made himself the same as Toronto.”
Given that the city’s tourism economy is estimated to be about C$8.8 billion ($6.66 billion), the claim turned into the 31-year old Toronto native being responsible for 5% of that. Several hip-hop blogs and a couple of more mainstream publications picked up the detail.
The “Drake effect” included the cool factor that the artist brings to Toronto by calling the city “The 6,” serving as the global ambassador to the Toronto Raptors NBA team, and buying a 40,000-square-foot home in the area. Hendren told Yahoo Finance that Charlton Insights also used Google Trends searches for tourism traffic and YouTube plays to come up with an estimate that, “based on our experience with economic impact studies, we believe [is] reasonable.”
However, experts dispute the quantified conclusion.
“The notion that any individual performer or business can have that big an impact on a city’s economy is a load of crap — or, if you prefer, an urban legend,” Neil DeMause, a veteran editor at the Village Voice and contributor to Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), told Yahoo Finance.
‘Economic impact is a nebulous concept’
There’s no doubting that Drake is on a serious hot streak. Seven songs from his new album, “Scorpion,” are in the top 10 of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart (and all 25 songs make the list).
Nevertheless, the superstar’s impact on the tourism economy in Toronto is a very difficult number to accurately estimate.
“Generally speaking, I would never attribute a single-digit percentage increase in a city, country, or jurisdiction’s economic output to a single individual,” Geoffrey Propheter, assistant professor at the University of Colorado’s School of Public Affairs, told Yahoo Finance.
To measure Drake’s impact, Propheter said, one would have to separate people who would have spent money in Toronto because of Drake from those who would have spent money in Toronto anyway.
In other words, people choosing Drake-affiliated restaurants over non-Drake-affiliated ones doesn’t mean they are adding value to the economy — the choice simply redistributed the income from one party to another.
“Most of the superstar power — particularly in really large cities — is going to be through this redistribution mechanism,” Propheter said. “Economic impact is a nebulous concept. It means different things to different people. It’s measuring economic activity.”