In 2013, the Royal Canadian Mint wanted to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Canadian Arctic Expedition. What’s more, we had to reach out to a new audience: children 6 to 11 years old.

Advertising to children is heavily regulated in Canada. Advertising that is directed to children must not exploit their credulity, lack of experience or their sense of loyalty, and must not present information or illustrations that might result in their physical, emotional or moral harm. In the French-speaking province of Quebec, advertising to children under 12 is strictly forbidden unless the advertiser provides educational content.

This doesn’t mean children do not consume media. Research demonstrates that on a weekly basis, Canadian children spend more than 20 hours in front of the TV and an additional 7 hours using the computer. Knowing that 48% of Canadian children own a game console, we were aware that our audience was out there, but certainly more interested in TV shows and immersive video games.

Given the scientific direction the Expedition had a 100 years ago, creating educational but fun content gave us the opportunity to convey our message to children and have them collect coins in both real and virtual worlds.

Heartofthearctic.ca is a 72,000 pixel wide parallaxing page that includes countless hotspots and animations, all seamlessly delivered on both desktop & tablet using HTML5. An online experience this rich used to only be possible in Flash.

Delivering a site this vast across platforms was what enabled the Mint to give children the type of deep, vivid experience they crave on the devices they use most.

More than 50,000 visitors. Over 1,000,000 views. 2,375 classrooms across Canada participated in the school program.