When Your Heart Needs Travel Canada’s Heart is Calling UGC

As Travel Manitoba looked to recover from the devastating impacts of the pandemic in 2021, the organization knew its seven-year-old brand, Manitoba, Canada’s Heart…Beats, needed to evolve.
The Canada’s Heart is Calling video series brings our refreshed brand to life by showcasing the culture, experiences and reasons to visit Manitoba.
In order to evoke the emotions we want travellers to feel when they come to Manitoba, UpHouse developed a new heart-messaging framework for all of Travel Manitoba’s advertising and marketing. The framework ties the new tagline together with a strong emphasis on how we feel when we travel. For each “heart word”, a brand video was developed.
A second set of videos was created with user generated content (UGC) sourced directly from local Manitobans wanting to share their love for the province. These UGC videos were produced specifically for social media in a vertical format and published as YouTube Shorts.
From the local marketing agency to the local Manitoban musicians and locally sourced content, the Canada’s Heart is Calling videos drew on the idea that Manitoba’s stories are best told by the people who live here.
We utilized social media channels including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and LinkedIn to run both paid ads and organic posts highlighting this unique series of brand videos. Since the launch of the brand campaign, the videos have been shared organically on our social media channels by our social followers and have been picked up by industry members to play at their events. In total, the videos have nearly 400,000 collective views after being live for just over 30 days.