Due to the economic downturn, international travel to Canada was on a steep decline. However, people still had the desire to travel.

Consumers were rejecting traditional travel destination messaging with their highly over produced campaigns, but were now being tempted by real travel experiences they’d seen from friends and family on social platforms. Once tempted they were doing further travel research online.

We chose to use the voices and experiences of real travellers to give an authentic representation of what it’s like to travel to Canada, and we did it in a way that consumers could relate to and interact with.

A central online hub was built using a large number of select Canadian travel experiences plus user generated experiences gathered from a previous domestic program. All elements of the campaign drove to the hub where consumers could experience more of a trip to Canada. From here they could comment on experiences, upload their own experiences, go directly to booking a trip, or share experiences with friends on their social sites.Television, print, online ads, interactive digital storescapes and newspaper wraps all drove to the online hub.

While the campaign is running through to the end of August and full business results are not yet available, preliminary campaign metrics have been extremely encouraging and it’s tracking to exceed all previous CTC efforts.Consumer website visits are up 86% over the same period in 2009, Facebook fan sign-ups have increased by 3500%. The response to QR codes has exceeded expectations and all known benchmarks. Just two weeks in, the CTC experienced an 86% increase in their Twitter following.The work has also garnered extensive PR coverage including being named best out-of-home on BestAdsonTV.com, coverage in Creativity Online, The Toronto Star, the National Post as well as psfk.com, the go-to source for the best ideas in the world.

Most notably, the campaign helped propel Canada to being named the number 1 country brand* in the world, up two places from number 3 a year earlier.*Calculated on the FutureBrand Index.