Finalist 2025
Brand & Media Owner Partnership
Brand
Brand Scotland
Entered by:
BBC StoryWorks EMEA
Scotland for the Head, Heart and Spirit
Credits:
Carat UK
The Challenge
Brand Scotland set BBC StoryWorks a clear challenge: to drive awareness and consideration of Scotland when considering places to visit, live, work, study, and do business, with a Talent Attraction focus for 24-25.
This was not a simple recruitment drive – it was a nation branding exercise, designed to shift perceptions and inspire action and longer-term commitment to a destination through inspirational storytelling.
The target audience, defined as “impatient idealists”, are individuals driven by purpose and progress. They are thought leaders, inspiration led and socially engaged.
The task was emotional, as much as rational. The campaign needed to make them feel and forge a genuine connection through storytelling that captured Scotland’s unique spirit. This meant moving beyond traditional messaging, and instead using multiple touchpoints to build a rich, resonant narrative over time.
Scotland’s greatest assets – its people, singular culture, myriad innovations and pristine natural beauty – became the foundations of the campaign. By showcasing real stories, human potential, and the country’s forward-thinking mindset, it set out to reposition Scotland on the world stage: not only as a beautiful place to visit — but as a dynamic nation where brilliant minds can thrive.
The Content Solution
Our initial research identified the campaign audience as a group of skilled, purpose-driven people looking for impact, belonging and meaningful connection. This insight shaped a campaign rooted in emotional storytelling, rather than transactional messaging. Anchored by a story that humanises the opportunity and makes it tangible for target audiences, it was designed to inspire through its authenticity.
This meant that our holistic campaign (including film and digital) focused on people not policy. The heart of the campaign was a hero film featuring Sarah Clarke, Marketing Manager at Orbital – a pioneering company harnessing tidal energy in the Orkney Islands. Sarah’s story embodied the campaign’s message: that Scotland is not only a place of professional opportunity, but one of belonging, purpose and community.
As someone who had relocated for work and became fully embedded in local life (she met a Scottish man, had twins, has a group of friends she bikes and runs with) Sarah brought the perfect blend of credibility and inspiration. Her voice was honest, her surroundings breathtaking, and her work meaningful – everything expected to resonate with our audience of “impatient idealists”. Using fast-paced cuts alongside a slower paced narrative, we emulated the perfect balance of Scottish work-life balance, engaging the audience with witty vox pops as well as explaining how Scotland is the place to be.
To engage younger digital natives, we extended the campaign into social-first formats creatively produced specifically for TikTok. Vox pop-style interviews and point-of-view footage, drawn from the hero content, were adapted into short-form videos for the channel, bringing original, raw, in-the-moment energy that helped drive reach and relatability.
Complementing the hero film, we commissioned a long-form editorial piece written from the first-person perspective of Eleanor Ross, a freelance writer who moved to Scotland from England. Her article brought added depth and relatability, weaving in the experiences of three others who had made the move across different sectors — from art gallery curators to space tech engineers — and chosen to stay, not just for the jobs, but for the quality of life, community and values Scotland offered.
By combining cinematic storytelling with grounded, real-life perspectives and platform-native content, the campaign formed a multi-layered narrative that did more than inform – it also moved people. It presented Scotland not just as a workplace, but as a place to call home.
The Media/Content Amplification Solution
To ensure the campaign reached and resonated with the right audiences, we executed a focused amplification strategy across digital and social channels with content specifically tailored and produced for that platform and audience — whether that was BBC.com or TikTok.
A mix of paid and organic social promotion of the hero video cut-downs, as well as our supporting article, drove great traffic and engagement, and helped build momentum around the campaign message. These assets were tailored to platform, optimised for attention, and directed audiences to the full content experience.
To support UK-specific targeting, we launched a mirror site to ensure a consistent user experience while allowing for regional nuance in messaging and performance tracking.
High-impact, custom media units — designed and written by the BBC StoryWorks team — brought the campaign to life on BBC.com and on our app. A desktop video banner showcased a 30-second edit of the hero film, while mobile users encountered a 15-second version via an engaging interscroller format – delivering a seamless and immersive experience across devices.
We further extended reach by repurposing an existing 60-second TVC. By integrating the new hero narrative, we refreshed the creative without the need for additional production spend – maximising the value of previous investment while aligning with the new storytelling direction.
Video distribution was supported by targeted YouTube pre-roll placements, where a 15-second cut of the hero film achieved a hugely impressive 88% video completion rate, demonstrating strong viewer engagement and message retention.
This multi-pronged approach combined emotional storytelling with strategic delivery, ensuring the campaign reached a wide yet client-relevant audience across key moments and platforms.
The Result
The campaign delivered excellent results across all channels, capturing attention and driving meaningful engagement with our target audience and exceeding the client’s KPIs.
The hero content and supporting editorial drove over 50,000 page views, while social video assets generated 818,000 views — demonstrating the effectiveness of our storytelling approach in sparking interest and emotional connection.
Bespoke on-site video formats performed particularly well. The 15-second mobile interscroller unit achieved 625,314 impressions with a 46% completion rate, while the 30-second desktop Video Banner delivered 575,895 impressions and a 51% completion rate—indicating strong viewer engagement across both formats.
On TikTok, six short-form behind-the-scenes vox-pops creatives drove nearly 1 million impressions (995,000), bringing the campaign to younger audiences in an authentic, platform-native way.
TV amplification further extended reach, with spots achieving a combined total reach of 29.5 million, significantly increasing visibility and reinforcing key messaging at scale.
The BBC’s in-house emotional engagement measurement tool, Science of Engagement (SoE), which uses eye-tracking and facial encoding technology to track emotional impact and specific points of content engagement, found strong sentiment uplift – 61% of viewers believed that ‘Scotland is a progressive nation’ (after viewing the campaign), with a 45% uplift in belief that ‘Scotland is innovative’.
Our AdScore results found that the campaign helped boost perceptions of Scotland as a location to work (+67%), study (+37%) and visit (+12%). 85% felt strongly that the content could be trusted.
Together, the campaign’s multi-channel distribution strategy and emotionally-driven creative approach delivered a high-impact performance tailored to the target audiences’ interests —raising awareness, shifting perceptions, and positioning Scotland as a place of immense opportunity and inspiration for skilled talent.