Destination Canada invited National Geographic CreativeWorks to explore the concept of openness in remote locations. The campaign goals were to communicate to the target traveller that Canada offers a unique blend of openness—open spaces, open hearts, and open minds—offering space for growth and enrichment. Specific communication goals were:

• Inspire awe with Canada’s open spaces.
• Fuel refreshing perspectives with open minds.
• Foster a sense of belonging with open hearts.

Through customer research, Destination Canada has carefully defined and refined target audiences from key markets. Specifically, their core target Outdoor Explorer visitor seeks adventure, wildlife, and nature, actively seeking to explore remote and less-travelled locations. The stated benefit for these travellers was “In a world that makes us feel trapped, Canada’s openness helps us break free”.

These preferences align strongly with both National Geographic’s consumer audience and its own Explorer community, and it is the latter that share the same mission – to connect travellers with indigenous peoples, uncharted journeys, wellness, and sustainable travel.

With a great natural fit between the two brands’ missions, National Geographic CreativeWorks saw an opportunity to take a different approach to a traditional content production shoot. Instead, they gave three National Geographic Explorers an open brief to create inspiring stories with meaningful narratives, beautiful photography, and video footage.

The Explorers were given just two parameters:

1. Choose locations that reflect their authentic experience of Canada’s openness whilst highlighting diverse experiences, sustainability initiatives, and are respectful of all local cultures.
2. Focus content on seasons inspired by Canada’s Indigenous Peoples calendar, which is informed by nature and the world around them.

With the added luxury of 15 days on the road, the ever-curious Explorers’ aim was to produce video, audio and narrative content which would support a fully integrated multi-channel campaign encouraging visitation and inspiring love for Canada.

The photo assignment for the National Geographic Explorers, entrusted with complete creative freedom to tell the stories they lived during their defined season in their own way, was a first. By giving them the time to really connect with the people, land, flora, and fauna, the aim was to capture the spirit and openness of the people and spaces across Canada.

The distinctiveness of this approach was in the choice to have three photographers with three unique perspectives on the world, a lengthened production duration, and giving the artistic vision and direction to the photographers in the field.

To ensure there was a strong compelling narrative that would thread the stories together, the CreativeWorks team supported their research around the elements of the Canada’s Indigenous Peoples calendar ensuring each photographer had a guide to connect the stories.

The three seasons were:

• Season of Bounty: A time of coming together before the winter freeze. Harvest, festivals, family celebrations, bears and salmon.
• Season of Twilight: A time of relaxation, silence, clean crisp air, magical lights, night time adventures.
• Season of Wonder: A time of excess. Abundant sunlight, outdoor activities, kayaking, epic hiking, vast blue skies and balmy long evenings.

For each season, the photographers captured 50 images, along with ambient video clips designed to highlight Canada’s openness in hearts, minds, and spaces.

The campaign was highly relevant for Destination Canada because of the depth and diversity of the content enabled through the thematic and time-based stories. Importantly the content featured Indigenous perspectives and working with local guides we ensured these voices were heard and represented in tourism. It also promoted Canada’s authentic identity, presenting a fuller picture of the country’s urban culture, culinary richness, and deep connection between people and the land.

There was a focus on sustainable and responsible travel, showcasing eco-friendly and culturally respectful experiences and the location choices encouraged exploration of lesser-known regions like the Yukon and Northern Canada.

When developing creative for the media traffic-driving assets specifically, the team focused on what resonates most with our travel audience: adventure, immersive experiences, breathtaking visuals, and authentic, social-style content. As a result, we ensured our media creatives accurately captured our photographers’ journeys, with a heavy emphasis on wildlife imagery based on previous campaign learnings.

National Geographic is a long-time media partner of Destination Canada as they share heavily-aligned target audiences and a mission to tell destination stories beyond the obvious, highlighting the sense of place. Destination Canada sought a leading media brand to benefit from excellence in creativity, high-quality production, valuable research, and the opportunity to extend into events, social platforms, and Disney+ streaming.

By leveraging a mix of platforms and formats across the Disney ecosystem, including National Geographic, and compelling storytelling, we delivered a holistic approach that resonated with audiences on multiple levels. The diversity of platforms provides extensive reach and meaningful engagement, optimizing for frequency while minimizing wastage to deliver efficiency and effectiveness.

A balanced organic and paid approach was strategically chosen, with National Geographic’s large and loyal following fostering trust and driving organic interactions. Paid promotion boosted highly targeted traffic and visibility of high-performing creative.

Each platform and creative asset combination was selected based on previous learnings to optimize different aspects of the campaign according to the campaign KPIs.

Nationalgeographic.com hosted long-form articles, videos and photo galleries on our dedicated Canada Travel guide, along with editorial content, providing a more interactive and engaging experience.

Instagram was essential for driving video views and engagement metrics. With visual-first creative formats such as reels, posts, and carousels, it effectively told stories through imagery and short-form videos, fostering community interaction through organic formats.

Facebook drove traffic to article pages on nationalgeographic.com. We targeted adventure travellers, ecotourism enthusiasts, and frequent travellers. We used a combination of image and link posts, focusing on wildlife imagery, which resonated best with our audiences. Facebook’s combination of broad reach and precise targeting made it an ideal choice for content discovery and driving traffic back to our long-form articles

YouTube was a natural choice to host our hero videos, given its long-established National Geographic audience primed for consuming long-form content. Additional amplification through in-stream ads targeted YouTube’s vast and enthusiastic reach for adventure travel. By complementing organic efforts with paid amplification, we were expecting to scale engagement without sacrificing the authenticity of the content.

Finally, Disney+ added a further layer for increased visibility, amplifying and reinforcing the campaign messaging in a more immersive environment.

So did we inspire travellers to act? We did! The campaign impacted both top and bottom funnel metrics with statistical significance.

• 12% increase amongst campaign recallers when stating they were likely to start planning a trip to Canada.
• Awareness levels of Canada as a destination increased by 12 percentage points and the appeal of lesser-known regions improved with strong appeal for both Québec and the Maritimes.

Post-campaign sentiment analysis demonstrated the content successfully promoted a greater desire for new and unexplored destinations. Specifically, there was an increased appetite for active and adventurous experiences and interest in natural wonders, wildlife, cultural heritage, and local cuisine. This is completely aligned with the values of open minds, open spaces and open hearts.

We consistently saw above benchmark performance on nationalgeographic.com and in the media plan as follows:

• 2.5X average site dwell time as a result of the combination of text and multimedia content.
• 1.5X target engagements achieved with Instagram Reels accounting for 74% of total video views, of which one adventure focused reel featuring travel by a floatplane reached 2.5m views.
• The Insta carousel format also performed exceptionally well, with the stunning photography achieving significantly higher than industry average engagement rates.
• Facebook drove 89% of clicks and exceeded the page view target by 40,000. The best performing Facebook dark post was a stunning image of a local Wild Mountain Tours horse guide resting her face against her horse’s face in the wilderness of the Yukon Territory – CTR of 2.02% and engagement rate of 2.72%.
• The YouTube activity significantly boosted views by 9X. 1m people viewed at least one of the three five-minute hero videos via instream ad amplification.
• Disney+ saw a 94% video completion rate for 60” video length.

NGCW Destination Canada -Season of Wonder video

NGCW Destination Canada – Season of Bounty gallery

NGCW Destination Canada – Season of Twilight gallery