Let the Northern Lights Speak to You: Life-changing lights campaign surpasses expectations

For the second year running, Destination Canada has partnered with Travel Manitoba, Northwest Territories Tourism and Travel Yukon on a northern lights campaign.

Targeting high-value guests in key U.S. locations like New York and California, the show-stopping campaign ran from September 9 to October 28, 2024, unifying Canadian destinations and enticing U.S. residents to visit the best place in the world to view the life-changing northern lights.


Taking advantage of their combined buying power, the group was able to buy digital out of home advertising space in some of the most highly-sought after locations in New York City and Los Angeles.

Joining forces with Travel Yukon and Northwest Territories Tourism to partner with Destination Canada allows us to pool our resources to maximize our buying power. Our unified approach brings us an otherwise unimaginable opportunity to market in high-profile digital out of home locations like Times Square in New York or Kurve on Wilshire and Vermont Spectacular in Los Angeles. Displaying the amazing northern lights viewing opportunities available in Churchill to high-value guests helps drive awareness and funnel those potential guests to our tourism operators,
Vice-President of Marketing Cody Chomiak.

The digital out of home (DOOH) ads were supported with a digital and social campaign which linked to a microsite listing packages to explore and a FAQ section to help travellers plan their trip, covering the best viewing times, weather considerations and essential travel tips. All digital ads included a conversion pixel to track visitor behaviour over time, which generated improved analytics data. The primary goal was to raise potential U.S. visitors’ awareness about Canada’s amazing northern lights viewing and further their interest. The results were compelling.

Paid Media Results:

  • Impressions: Delivered 165 million total impressions, exceeding the target of 115 million.
  • Views (Awareness): Achieved 9.4 million views, surpassing the target of 6.9 million.
  • Conversion (Interest): Nearly a third more clicks than our target of 14,300.
  • Landing Page Views (Interest): Reached 470,000 views, exceeding the target of 428,000 views.

Travel Manitoba-specific results:

  • Over 34,000 views on our pages during the campaign period.

To further bolster the paid advertising spend, a strong earned media campaign supported by Destination Canada’s efforts ran from May 1 to October 31, 2024, including media outreach and hosted Familiarization (Fam) tours. The efforts generated significant media attention with 85 media mentions. Between paid and earned media, a total of 2.3 billion impressions were generated and included top coverage in AFAR, Further and Outside Magazine as well as Travel+Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, The New York Times and USA Today.

The approach for the landing page evolved this year. Building on last yearʼs insights, the focus was to optimize page content for top search keywords, develop new audience-focused themes and information and refine the layout to enhance user experience, engagement and exploration. Data showed the map feature was the most engaging element on the landing page in the first year of the campaign. In 2024, the map was relocated on the landing page and a graph illustrating the best times to view the northern lights in each partnerʼs destination was added. The top-performing article “Where to See the Northern Lights in Canada” was updated from the previous year to include individual graphs for each region. The partners added a new article highlighting the Solar Maximum phenomenon and why this is the perfect time to visit Canada to view the northern lights.

The adjustments and refinements continue to yield excellent results and return on investment for the campaign as well as the partner Destination Management Organizations.

Partnership initiatives like these are the key to success in growing demand for the northern lights season and Travel Manitoba is excited to continue collaborating with Destination Canada to market the life-changing lights.