The status quo is now the selling point for Destination Canada. What’s normal to Canadians – stunning outdoor vistas, co-operative communities, a natural sense of ease – is remarkable to others.

The destination marketer’s new campaign, a creative collaboration with Rethink, uses quiet vignettes and everyday occurrences to position travel in the country as an antidote to over-hyped, and ultimately less substantial, experiences elsewhere.

“It’s in response to what’s going on in the travel world today, which is full of increasingly overly curated or quite-filtered experiences, ones that may not be all that authentic,” Gloria Loree, Destination Canada’s CMO and SVP of marketing strategy, tells strategy. “What we’re promising is connectivity and that, when you come here, you’ll connect with other people and hopefully more with yourself.”

“Canada, naturally” is a long-term campaign that’s part of Destination Canada’s strategic goal to push tourism revenue to $160 billion annually by 2030.

Now live in California, New York, New Jersey and Texas, the rollout is led by three 30-second videos and back by a media campaign that spans OOH, connected TV, social media and other digital placements.

Initiative worked on paid media and Praytell handled PR in the U.S.

The film spots were captured in 35mm film to lend a natural aesthetic to the scenes of roadside fill-ups in the Rocky Mountains and backyard BBQs backdropped by the northern lights.

One OOH activation uses low-resolution Google Street Views of Canadian landscapes to spark the imaginations of passersby into picturing what the real thing would look like. Placements were selected to best juxtapose big-city living with the calm of life in Canada.

“Some of these executions are very thoughtful in terms showing up alongside really congested, tight downtown spaces,” Loree says. “The internal language the team used was a peaceful takeover.”

May’s U.S. activation will be followed by rollouts in Britain in August and China in September.

Loree says familiarity, regard, meaning and uniqueness will be correlated with sentiment and forward-booking trends to assess campaign performance.

Through segmentation research, Destination Canada developed three “personas” – culture seekers, refined globetrotters and outdoor explorers – to represent a target demographic of curious deep-learning travellers that yield higher-end purchases.

“We’ve done that research in every one of our markets so that we can help show up where where it’s most efficient for us and helpful to them,” Loree says.

In 2024, Destination Canada orchestrated a winter pickleball a pop-up experience in an attempt to attract American visitors. And the Crown corporation’s “Maple Leave” campaign of winter 2023 positioned Canada as a stress reliever to potential tourists.

Loree says “Canada, naturally” takes a subtler approach while still touching on the light-hearted humour that’s part of the brand.

“We are just reflecting this kind of nice light humour, and we’re also reflecting a kind of humbleness in a heroic way, I think,” Loree says. “Canadians are delighted right now to hear how much the world does love us. It’s not to say the entire world is craving everything Canada has, but our best guests are.”