Two years ago, Nature Valley asked us to help them increase the visibility of their commitment to nature preservation, and build credibility with avid hikers and casual nature lovers, important granola bar consumer segments. We created Trail View – a first-of-it’s-kind street view experience on hiking trails in the U.S. national parks. This year, the goal for Trail View 2.0 was to expand the digital preservation effort and incorporate all Nature Valley preservation efforts.

Our teams have hiked over 400 miles of trails across the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone National Park, The Great Smoky Mountains, and Sequoia National Park. Over 8.8 terabytes of footage, 12 million+ image files, and more than 172,000 GPS points were collected and transformed into an interactive experience and digital preservation program.

The site is now home to an interactive hub for all Nature Valley preservation activity, including two on-site meadow restoration projects from Sequoia. This new section displays national preservation needs, and what the brand is doing to help.

Trail View officially launched to the tech-savvy crowd at SXSW in Austin, Texas, which led to a flurry of coverage from media outlets ranging from the New York Times to Treehugger to MSNBC.

Since then, Nature Valley has enjoyed a positive P.R. buzz unlike anything they’ ever seen. Without a single dollar of paid media, Trail View has generated more than 30 million earned media impressions to date. Within the first two weeks the site had generated more than 100,000 unique visits, and 300,000 page views.

To start, we needed to plant a flag that Nature Valley, a brand not known for its technological prowess, was embarking on an ambitious park preservation effort. To that end, Fast Company teased the piece several months in advance of the site launch. The week of the launch, a New York Times article captured the public’s attention, and was followed up by MSNBC, Reuters and others. Launching at SXSW in Austin, Texas brought us face-to-face with influential tech blogs like Mashable and Engadget, and the SXSW buzz led to the story being picked up across the web. From Backpack to Treehugger to Trip Advisor, Nature Valley was being applauded for creating such an important utility and for preserving the parks digitally for all time. Since then, being featured in Google’s Creative Sandbox, IDEO’s lecture series, and within the blogosphere has enabled the PR story to adapt as the platform evolves.

The Pandora Delivery Event helped launch a product that no one had ever heard of in an incredibly newsworthy way. With limited paid media and the use of social media, PR and word-of-mouth marketing, the event generated 2.7 million impressions in just three days. And when our team arrived with the product, participants were delightfully surprised and sometimes even shocked that this was a real event, created just to get them to reconsider breakfast. It also gave us the opportunity to make personal contact via social media, keep up with participants and follow along as they shared their experiences.