Migration of ideas and culture is a theme Atlantic readers seek out. For this program, Our Studio identified three trends still taking shape in the UK but already shifting to America: the resurgence of new, genre-defying Jazz, a return to primal cooking methods in fine dining, and the surprising popularity of calligraphy on social media.

With these insights we conceived The British Impact, a three-part, transatlantic storytelling project following greatly influential British personalities in jazz, dining and typeface design, the next generation making waves in those fields, and their American counterparts. The Jaguar F-PACE facilitated a journey from the heart of London, to the forests of Kent, to the outskirts of Peckham.

The program takes readers to a never-before-seen depth of narrative through new digital storytelling tools. By engaging with interactive video, longform content, audio scenery, and original photography, readers could gain familiarity as well as unparalleled insight into each topic.

The British Impact was a large-scale production, including two international video shoots and numerous interviews. The program’s highly visual multimedia format, with each chapter headlined by a short documentary on the interactive video platform Verse, made it incomparable as a story and resource. Through Verse, readers could take in the documentaries but maintain their independence, exploring other artifacts that made the story even more compelling. The program contained 39 crafted pieces of content altogether, ranging from photo galleries to interactive Q&As to lists of recommendations.

Excerpting each video documentary for social channels proved crucial in driving readers to the experience. A longer promotion timeline for each chapter (7-8 weeks) also allowed readers to fully explore the story of each innovator and the complementary content. This flexibility in distributing the program offered a more visible impact from both an audience and brand perspective.

The program had considerable success, over-indexing on all engagement benchmarks. Page views were nearly 3.5 times the average, and social actions were double the average. Each topic excelled in particular aspects: “Food” had the most social actions, almost 5 times the average; “Music” registered a scroll depth (reader interest) 80% above index; “Design” showed the most time before scroll (2.5 times), indicating readers’ attention was held by the headlining documentary.

The program had external ripples as well, receiving widespread positive responses from top influencers in each field. It also boosted Jaguar awareness among both existing and prospective buyers by at least 10 times, to the brand’s own success: Jaguar was the fastest-growing auto brand in the US in 2016, and the F-PACE model is now its fastest-selling model in history. The British Impact proved its manyfold success as a business case, a storytelling unit, and a breaker of media barriers.