Qualitative research revealed that although Americans appreciate Canada for its natural wonders, perception of unique culture and excitement was low, creating a barrier to visiting now. Quantitative research also revealed a 30% drop between considering a trip, to contextualizing what a Canadian experience could be like. Once those perception barriers were broken, Americans were keen to learn more and motivated to visit soon.

Understanding the triggers that turns motivation into action was key to our success, so our idea was grounded in two key insights:

1) Travel inspiration no longer comes from being told where to go but rather from influential and authentic content, sources of which are hyper-fragmented across the web; and

2) Peoples’ passions and interests are catalysts for travel inspiration.

Our idea, “It’s All Found in Canada”, would showcase the variety of unexpected experiences Canada offers, filtered through the interests and passions of our core audiences.

Our channel selection included 1) Online Video and Home Page Takeovers; 2) Publisher partnerships amplified by Paid Social and Native; and 3) Programmatic Display, Facebook Marketplace and SEM.

The binding element was a robust data infrastructure, which included over 5,000 tags deployed across all tactics, content and co-investor partners. With co-created publisher content being 40% of our investment it was key to include this data in our ecosystem. To that end we were a first-in-industry to successfully tag content pages of major global publishers.

Harmonizing all data into our DMP, this fed our programmatic buy allowing us to not only optimize and discover new audiences, but deliver down-funnel custom creative via our bespoke dynamic ad tool that matched specific co-investor offers to upper-funnel content consumption.

Finally, partnering with travel-specific data companies we linked our campaign to action in the form of hotel bookings and mobile geo-location of arriving travelers.

MEDIA RESULTS

• Completed video-views surpassed target by 68%

• Publisher content engagements surpassed target by 213%

• Over 837,000 leads were driven to our investor partners from the campaign, exceeding our goal by more than 4x.

BRAND RESULTS

• 60% of recent American visitors recall seeing the campaign; increasing to 79% among those within our core target group.

• Among those aware of the campaign, 70% were more likely to have taken a trip to Canada vs those unaware.

•Furthermore, we saw significant increase in key perception metrics between Americans aware of the campaign vs. unaware:

- Ideal climate for a holiday: +25%

- Provides unique holiday experiences: +15%

- An exciting place: +9%

BUSINESS RESULTS

•We absolutely crushed our 2016 goals, with campaign-attributable incremental visits exceeding target by 151,000 (+62%) and revenue by $115 Million (+83%).