With a portion of its populace labelled “deplorables,” and increasingly unsavoury talk of wall building, crooks and anatomy-grabbing, Toronto agency The Garden felt Americans shell-shocked by the U.S. presidential election could use a little pick-me-up.
The Garden founder Shari Walczak said for the past several weeks, mornings at the agency have typically begun with a disheartening recap of the previous day’s madness in what has been the most divisive U.S. election ever.
“Even though we’re here in Canada, you start to realize how closely connected we are with everything that’s going on in the U.S.,” said Walczak. “We started to feel that sense of how heavy and depressing it is.”
Rather than simply lamenting the sorry state of affairs, however, Walczak and her colleagues decided to try and do something about it.
On Thursday, the agency debuted a new campaign called “Tell America it’s Great,” inviting Canadians to take to social media and give some of the reasons they love their southern neighbour, using the hashtag “TellAmericaItsGreat.
The campaign, a nod to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again,” also includes a dedicated website as well as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts.
It debuted with a one-and-a-half-minute video featuring Canadians praising the U.S. for everything from its National Park Service to its disability rights movement and the fact its citizens donate more than $250 billion a year to charity.
The campaign has generated more than 100,000 tweets and almost two billion media impressions in just four days, garnering coverage from major media outlets including The New York Times, NPR and Fast Company. It has even inspired a U.S. response called “#TellCanadaThankYou.”
The campaign went viral before The Garden could even make its way through the list of influencers it had assembled to help promote it, said Walczak. “The internet kind of just took over,” she said. “It’s unbelievable just reading the messages and seeing how happy people are and how it’s really touched them.”
Of course, this being the internet, the campaign has also earned its share of detractors.
Walczak said she is not surprised, but heartened by the reaction to “Tell America it’s Great,” describing the campaign as a “right place, right time” initiative.
“Our first goal was to get Canadians starting to tweet and add to the conversation, but… what we hadn’t necessarily thought about as much was the reaction from Americans. Their outpouring has been amazing,” she said. “We wanted it to have a life of its own, because that’s where it’s truly authentic and genuine and you see you’ve really tapped into a real human insight.”
And while the campaign wasn’t conceived as a way of attracting the attention of prospective U.S. clients, Walczak said that The Garden is “fully capable” of working with clients south of the border.
“If we get a contact through our website of any American client who’d like to work with us, we will be more than happy to take that business,” she said.
