Good foundation

The multi-platform tactic followed the establishment of Brand USA’s international offices and its trade focus explains Tom Garzilli, chief marketing officer.

“That foundation had to be built before we could really get deeper into our consumer-facing messaging, and what we know is if we deliver educational, entertaining and authentic content to consumers, we can inspire them into action,” he says.

“That led us to developing our multi-stream strategy. Looking at the different technologies and places where people are, it’s important for us to be where they are – inspiring them in the ways they want to be reached. And the key to doing that is having the right content for the right screen with the right audience.

“Giant screens were our first big foray into storytelling. Why? Because the audience that tends to go to these venues where the giant screens are – museums, science centres and big attractions – are likely to be travellers. Imax movies are so immersive and evocative in terms of getting emotional about wanting to experience the USA. They are just great platforms for storytelling.”

Getting National Parks Adventure to the screens took two-and-a-half years, Garzilli adds. Celebrating the centenary of the National Park Service, it has been seen by eight million people on Imax screens since its launch in February 2016, with a further two million streaming it online. Of those, 1.5 million downloads have been in China via video hosting service Youku, while another eight million [people] have watched the trailer. Since February this year, Netflix has been streaming it globally, adding to the potential viewing audience.

“We just finished our first detailed ROI (return on investment) study of National Parks Adventure. It never stops generating ROI, as audiences will be seeing it in the future. But as of now, the ROI is in excess of 60 to 1. To put that in perspective, the Brand USA ROI, which we think is fantastic, is about 30 to 1 on our marketing, so we know this kind of storytelling works and we’re going to continue to do it.”

America’s Musical Journey is narrated by another Hollywood superstar, Morgan Freeman, and follows musician Aloe Blacc as he traces the music that helped shape America’s culture – jazz, blues, country, rock ’n’ roll and hip-hop. His journey takes him to cities such as New Orleans, Chicago, New York, Miami, Memphis and Nashville, following in the footsteps of Louis Armstrong, Elvis Presley and other music legends.

Honoured with the Best Audience Recommendation Award at the 2018 Beijing International Film Festival, it has opened in six cities across Canada as well as in Paris, Moscow, and locations in Mexico and India. It is showing in Australia, Spain and the Netherlands in the summer, with London set to receive it in October.

Immersive experience

The film is the 40th Imax film created by MacGillivray Freeman since 1976. In that time, the number of Imax theatres worldwide has grown from four to more than 1,000. MacGillivray Freeman president Shaun MacGillivray, who produced both Brand USA films, describes the format as “special and unique” because it is so immersive.

“If you tell impactful, powerful stories in that medium, it can be really, really inspiring,” he says, adding that surveys had shown 81% of people internationally who had watched National Parks Adventure were more likely to visit the US afterwards.

He adds the film company pitched the idea of the music theme for the second movie to Brand USA and suggested the locations and chose the A-list narrator, as it had for the first film.

“We want the narrator to feel connected to the film. With Robert Redford, conservation is part of his DNA, so we felt he was the perfect storyteller for that [National Parks Adventure],” he says.

Both films have original film scores. However, Blacc wrote a song especially for America’s Musical Journey – released on the day the film premiered – which MacGillivray hopes will be nominated for a Grammy or Academy Award.

He says Brand USA was a “fantastic partner to work with”, while Garzilli acknowledges Expedia as its main partner on the Imax projects. “We could not have done these films without Expedia,” he says, adding the partnership of both Subaru, for the first film, and Air Canada, for the latest one, was also “critically important”.

Garzilli explains the move into streaming television with the launch of GoUSA TV offered the opportunity to continue adding content.

“What we learned from the films is that, wonderful though they are, the content is static,’ he says. “So if you go and see National Parks Adventure today, it’s the same film you saw two years ago – still fresh, but it’s the same places. We have an unending supply of great places to talk about and great stories to tell.

“That’s why we chose streaming television, because it is a very rapidly growing technology. It’s going from being in 400 million households in 2017 to 650 million in 2021. GoUSA TV is on Roku, Amazon and Apple – and it will be on Google Chromecast very soon.

“The goal of GoUSA TV is to become the most important, largest US content channel. And we’re going to do that by curating, licensing and creating our own content. So we are talking to great partners like Discovery, National Geographic, the BBC and other content creators to license their content to us. We’re also going to partners like California, Illinois, Texas and Tennessee, who have great content.

“We launched GoUSA TV in February. We only started marketing it in April. We were targeting to do three million video views by year-end and we already have two and a half million video views. So we will have certainly surpassed three million by mid-summer.”

As for future projects, Brand USA and MacGillivray Freeman have already begun planning a third Imax film, due for release in February 2020.

“We’ll probably focus a little bit more on creators and innovators,” says Garzilli. “We want to talk about how exploration across the country developed. Beyond that, it’s hard to really say what it’s going to look like. It’s so early.”