The Adventure Effect

Background

At almost 90 years old, YHA has a proud history of helping people from all walks of life to explore the beauty and breadth of England and Wales. It’s well-established as a provider of hostel accommodation, but few people know it’s a charity with a mission to transform young lives through travel and real adventure. The brief was to change that and to demonstrate the transformative power of adventure.

Idea

The Adventure Effect was a social experiment, presented as a mini documentary. To show how vital adventure is to improving physical and mental wellbeing, what happens when you take it away? And what happens when you give it to those who’ve been missing out? For three days, professional adventurer Alistair Humphreys was confined to a shipping container and asked to complete a series of ‘non-adventures’. From walking in a figure of eight, to watching mind-numbing content on repeat, he was deprived of excitement. Meanwhile, a group of children who’d yet to experience adventure were given an eye-opening weekend of activities, including gorge walking, hill climbing and more. Over the three days, the explorer became depressed and reflective while the young people gained confidence, social skills and abilities. For both parties, it was a life-changing weekend, in very different ways. The project became an emotional sixminute film, presented to the public and YHA supporters on social channels.

Results

It’s a proven fact that children who regularly play outdoors are happier, healthier and more confident. The young participants said they gained a lot personally from the experience so the project had tangible results from the get-go.

With a very limited media budget, expectations were exceeded by reaching over half a million people to date. Wellknown education media also picked up the story, helping YHA gain greater awareness amongst the audiences it sought to reach and prompting the organisation to relaunch its Educational Breaks programme (an initiative now aiming to provide trips for 50,000 young people with challenging lives by 2020), publicising the opportunity to schools and groups who weren’t aware they could access this support.

50% of those who viewed the film online watched all the way through, double the industry standard for branded films longer than five minutes.

It helped underpin YHA’s January sale of family holidays, leading to revenues up 53% against 2018.

Our Thoughts

There is nothing flash or clever to this campaign and that belies its intelligence.

Often, it can seem as if creative people in agencies create advertising to impress each other and forget about the folks who live in Wichita or Woolhara or Wolverhampton. Not this nicely-paced video. If you’re familiar with the Hero, Hub, Help construct that YouTube advocates for brands, this is Hero content but visitors to YHATV can watch other more snackable videos about adventure as well as Hostel Hacks and tips on how to have big adventures on small budgets. In other words, they all work together within an eco-system that includes search, the YHA website and YouTube. Sounds obvious but I am amazed by how rare campaigns like this are.