For the first time in its 67-year history, Canadian Geographic magazine has moved beyond its traditional marketing approach of calls-to-action for subscriptions and launched a branding campaign.

The transit campaign, by Toronto shop Axmith Mcintyre Wicht, uses humor to emphasize the identity of the magazine by reminding Canadians that interesting – and visually-spectacular – places and events do indeed exist and occur in Canada.

One execution of the Toronto-only campaign shows the sandhills in Saskatchewan with the tag line ‘Not Arabian Geographic’; a second features a shot of the Barrie, Ont. tornado with the line ‘Not Texas Geographic’; while the third shows a grainy black-and-white photo that resembles a ufo sighting (it’s actually an archive photo of a Cape Breton kite-and-electricity experiment).

The tag line for the last execution is ‘Not Roswell Geographic’, a tongue-in-cheek reference to one of this past year’s more bizarre conspiracy theory stories – the 1947 alien encounter and cover-up in Roswell, n.m.

‘We wanted to build on the images that we do very well and execute it with some humor,’ says Deborah Trepanier, advertising director for the magazine, which is half-owned by Key Publishers in Toronto.

‘We’ve been in the marketplace a long time, but we also recognize that (well-branded) National Geographic has a higher awareness level than Canadian Geographic,’ says Trepanier. ‘This is the way to say that there is a Canadian book that is about Canadian experiences.’

Trepanier says that the campaign has a secondary purpose – to promote the magazine to the marketing community.

‘We have some business purposes behind this campaign as well,’ she says, adding that it made sense to focus on Toronto for that very reason. According to Trepanier, Canadian Geographic enjoys a paid circulation of 236,000.

A special oversized-format edition of Canadian Geographic is due out this spring. Titled ‘Through the Lens,’ the plan is to give the magazine’s writers and photographers room to tell stories beyond the scope of a normal magazine assignment.

The campaign, to run throughout the fall, will return at the beginning of 1998. amw also handled the media buy.