Previous campaigns

Phases of campaign

• Phase one | product awareness - We promoted that "Scotland is open" for tourism again, following the COVID-19 pandemic and its travel disruption.
• Phase two |influence behaviours - We encouraged visitors to "tread lightly" and think about responsible tourism when coming to Scotland. We also reinforced the message of Scotland as a safe and welcoming destination.
• Phase three | creative connections - We showcased the emotional value and benefit visitors get from a trip to Scotland.
• Phase four | build intent - We built on emotive messaging, tailored to our audience. In general, we targeted a younger “experience seeker” audience. For the UK market, we also targeted families and older couples who showed high intent to visit. The latter often had lower cost-of-living concerns and more travel time.

Throughout all phases, we wanted to move audiences along the visitor lifecycle; growing awareness and inspiring them with all that Scotland has to offer.

The campaign activity focused on the see, think, plan, and do stages of the visitor journey. It supported this with a programme of owned, earned, intermediary, and partnership marketing activities.

Watch our latest Scotland is Calling video

Creative direction

Our campaign aimed to show people what they are missing out on if they don’t visit Scotland. What could they not get elsewhere? It drew on those deep-rooted emotional connections.

It largely spoke to the core theme of connection. It allowed for flexibility across a range of formats, and always put our communication channel and audience first.

We created noise and urgency to visit with inspiring, light-hearted content. We used novel visual hooks that we knew resonated with the markets. Wherever possible, we made our media and creative PR-worthy.

Read more about connection and reconnection travel on afar.com.

We took a storytelling approach to our campaign creative, focusing on:

• the use the familiar and iconic to grow awareness and reinforce a sense of place
• the use of the unexpected and exciting to challenge perceptions of a place and inspirethe visitor
• positioning the visitor as the hero
• putting our people and communities to the fore through our continuous marketing and media efforts
• immersive formats that draw the audience in – movement, pace, first-person views
• brand elements that connect the campaign across formats and channels
• creating messaging that is specifically designed for an experience, rather than trying to amend a generic template
• creating messaging tailored to the audience and their level of familiarity with Scotland