Branded Entertainment is in its infancy in Canada as the kinks of traditional versus digital broadcasting get straightened out. The discussion about how to integrate brands into entertainment is largely focused on how this kind of content can enrich the offering of the traditional broadcast TV model to big brands (now allocating their advertising dollars to digital content).

The disconnection occurs when all these brands have the money to allocate toward content, but the networks cannot provide a valuable enough experience for these companies to justify their production spend because audiences are online and Canadian networks have almost no online audience/presence.

Although the large networks continue to try to lure companies and producers to create branded entertainment options on their existing broadcast platforms, the brands themselves are looking to their agencies for multi-platform content solutions that create and engage online and mobile communities.

Initially the characters reached out to their digital communities to share the content.

We then connected with media and developed a content partnership with MSN Travel accessing a pool 20x the size of ours.

Music was another engagement channel as we created original music to engage with Soundcloud and iTunes communities and offered free tracks for download.

AirTransat then took the series into their on-board entertainment giving us access to a whole new audience.

Finally, we added a contest to encourage sharing beyond our existing network.

Our multiple platforms and transmedia-content allowed us to organically grow a sizeable, engaged audience.

As the campaign continues to roll out (ending in August), we cannot fully assess the results of this project. But we can solidify the objectives of the program as two-fold:

1. Brand the trend. This kind of travel is not revolutionary, but there has never been a name for it.

Our goal is that the “basecamping” becomes the adjective to describe this kind of experience and comes with it a source of pride for the movement itself.

2. Deliver results. At the end of the day, this is a marketing tool for our sponsors by which we hope to achieve specific communication objectives: all-inclusive travel doesn’t have to be about “just sitting by the pool with drinks”. We have designed the series to tell stories that create a desire to replicate and thus purchase more packages (Nolitours), and visit the places we feature (Nolitours and local tourism boards).

Talking about results - based on the trajectory thus far, we forecast over 200,000 views on our online media, over 350,000 views on MSN travel Canada and over 2m views on the Air Transat Onboard entertainment system in our first year. Such results are considered very successful for the Canadian market.