The campaign’s primary goal was to increase understanding of the importance of ocean preservation.

Prior campaigns exceeded paid media performance objectives, but they ran only in National Geographic channels, potentially underleveraging the premium quality creative assets. There was an untapped opportunity for wider reach—both geographically and demographically—to meet the secondary goals of reaching a broader and younger audience. This third campaign therefore focused on three strategies:

1. National Geographic CreativeWorks produced a rich storytelling campaign based on a strong understanding of which creative formats have the potential to optimise nationalgeographic.com visits and dwell time for the hero content.
2. The team produced earned media-savvy creative assets with the inclusion of Prada’s A-list ambassadors Benedict Cumberbatch and Sadie Sink. National Geographic CreativeWorks was a natural choice to create inspiring educational content. By overtly including representatives of both partners in the creative, and using a documentary short-form format, the content would have more editorial interest to increase reach by gaining earned media.
3. Finally, National Geographic CreativeWorks would carefully curate and edit content to engage TikTok users, as proprietary research demonstrated a significant opportunity to specifically engage the younger demographic in the sustainability learning path. The use of TikTok was not just demographic logic; research showed a strong following of sustainability-led hash tags that were core to the fashion industry amongst TikTok users including #worldocean #sustainablefashion #zerowaste. Research further suggested that TikTok helps users better understand terms & language related to environmental issues and helps them take environmental issues (like climate change) more seriously.

The campaign-specific messaging objectives were:

• Explain how the 1% proceeds from Re-Nylon have been invested with SEA BEYOND
• Highlight the link between sustainability and education
• Showcase the Re-Nylon collections
• Further explain the reasons behind the project & relationship between Prada and National Geographic

For this educational phase, the creative vision was to tell the story of seeing beyond to a new future where our oceans are of prime importance. We called it Sea Beyond: Blue Future, and made a strategic choice to educate through inspiration as well as through explanation. The team curated four first-person accounts of unexpected, optimistic stories of the ocean, featuring projects where education has the potential to amplify the stories and drive a wave of change.

For each account, we produced breathtaking video and captivating photography, exquisitely styled and shot in keeping with the production values of National Geographic and the luxury quality associated with Prada.

Prada’s ambassadors Benedict and Sadie, as well as contributors from UNESCO’s SEA BEYOND programme, Valentina Gottlieb and Giovanni Chimienti (also a National Geographic Explorer) were a powerful combination featured across content to ensure the stories were told by respected and engaging voices.

Video
The four 3’ hero films were shot across two stunning locations: the icy Arctic waters of Norway and the tropical warm seas of Mexico. Beautifully narrated on location by Benedict in Norway and Sadie in Mexico, the films feature insightful contributions from SEA BEYOND’ers Giovanni Chimienti and Valentina Gottlieb, and important perspectives from local National Geographic Explorers.

The films skilfully connect viewers to SEA BEYOND’s core priorities—education, research, and conservation—by taking them behind the scenes, beneath the sea’s surface, and beyond. They illuminate the threats faced by marine environments and showcase the innovative efforts of SEA BEYOND’ers in engaging with ocean ecosystems. Ultimately, the films explore how the fashion industry can create awareness of issues bigger than just fashion to make a positive impact.

Photography
We engaged A-list photographer Celeste Sloman to capture a variety of images: reportage photography on location with SEA BEYOND’ers, Norwegian and Mexican landscapes, Prada products shot in dramatic outdoor locations, and Prada Ambassador portraits and lookbook photography with models in front of imagery shot in the studio.

TikTok Edits
0-60” reels were edited from the hero footage, reflecting topics relevant to the TikTok audience with titles: Trash to Treasure, Circular Journeys and Incredible Maritime Locations. Creative transitions and split screen techniques were used to keep the reels dynamic and engaging, and a fun anecdotal “did you know” element suited short TikTok formats.

The huge variety of content meant many options for channel and format expansions for both partners.

Prada worked with National Geographic once again due to our credibility with natural history content, the premium storytelling capability of the CreativeWorks team, and the media teams’ ability to efficiently and effectively deliver branded content engagement on nationalgeographic.com at scale.

With increased investment in on-screen creative and behind-the-scenes talent, the year three media plan included high quality placements as well as known traffic and engagement drivers with the aim of increasing reach into younger audiences. Highlights included:

• The dedicated Prada ‘SEA BEYOND’ hub on nationalgeographic.com, housing the four video articles and stunning photo galleries. Site-wide interest targeting of sustainability editorial consumption was used for traffic-driving.
• Dark Facebook ads used a combination of 30” hero cutdown videos and link posts to drive traffic to the site. We used specific interest-based targeting tactics including ocean conservation, environmental issues and the Prada brand.
• Using Instagram multimedia carousels, we created a slideshow containing video footage, as well as Hedcard images using a short burst of text to capture readers’ attention. Instagram carousels, along with other IG tactics, were used as they consistently drive high volume and engagement.
• YouTube hosted the full-length hero videos on our National Geographic brand channel, reaching a potential 24.4M subscribers. This audience, paired with additional amplification through in-stream ads, allowed us to target both subscribers and wider YouTube audiences with similar interests as used in the dark social placements.
• For the dedicated TikTok campaign, with the unique “did you know” edits and full-length video assets, we planned organic posts targeting for sustainability interest and to a younger demographic.
• We added Disney+ due to the consistently high view-through rates (95% at time of writing) and used a custom-made 90” asset, which gave Prada the ad break exclusivity for cut-through. This was a first for luxury brands on the platform, and a good example of how National Geographic CreativeWorks content can be extended within the Disney media ecosystem.
• Finally, to further extend the reach, we included the inside front cover of the National Geographic ‘NG33’ issue, showcasing the unique Re-Nylon campaign photography shot by the CreativeWorks team.

The sheer volume of creative assets supplied, all built using previous campaign performance learnings, meant we were able to consistently optimise for effectiveness and efficiencies during the live campaign. Additionally, Prada issued a press release about the campaign to further extend audience reach.

The campaign saw stand-out examples of very strong engagement with all platforms surpassing benchmarks. Significantly TikTok, with its bespoke creative, was 3X more effective than benchmark, successfully demonstrating message resonance with a younger audience in-line with campaign objectives.

On nationalgeographic.com, we achieved 2X the dwell time benchmark for the 4 video articles, averaging 4.50 mins and 9X visits with 344K page views and nearly 300K unique users.

Organic social media performed extremely well. TikTok saw engagement rates up to 6.93%, whilst organic Instagram Reels saw 2% and achieved 8.27M views. The new Instagram carousels drove 6.67M impressions from two posts whilst video posts on Facebook tracked up to 1.86% engagement rate.

In paid social we achieved 428K clicks, at 1.62% CTR, far exceeding our 0.7% benchmark. We saw individual dark posts on Instagram reach engagement rates of 17.15% and the highest CTR was 4.83% on the ‘Norway Net’ image promoting the SEA BEYOND hub. Paid Facebook also performed extremely well, with engagement rates of 6.57% and CTRs of 4.22%.

YouTube Reserved saw a 97% completion rate, exceeding our 75% average, whilst the roadblock sponsorship featuring Prada brand banners had overall CTR 0.55%, surpassing our benchmark of 0.2%.

Finally, extended reach was achieved with the new Disney+ exclusive ad break format and the campaign press release. We know that one view on Disney + is likely multiple people viewing content on one device, and the press release highlighting the talent behind the scenes and on film (as well as explaining the National Geographic partnership and sustainability) succeeded in extending the campaign reach into core international titles in the fashion arena.

NGCW Prada Sea Beyond content hub

NGCW/Prada Sea Beyond video