NWT Tourism Marketing Director Joel Walton in the new wrapped vehicle with Member Services Coordinator Chelsea Pukanich in the back using the Oculus Rift Virtual Reality headset. 

NWT Tourism launches “The Northwest Territories Will Change You” Marketing Campaign

For Immediate Release
January 22, 2020, NT

Northwest Territories Tourism is launching a brand-new campaign and it involves some very innovative components. 

The transformational change theme grew organically from stories from visitors who said over and over that a visit to the Northwest Territories changed them in some significant way. The challenge was to design a campaign to demonstrate to potential visitors the transformative power of the Northwest Territories, and the new campaign is the answer to this challenge. 

From January through April, here are some transformative, and very cool, things to watch for:

• The 2020 Explorers' Guide has a brand-new Augmented Reality feature. This feature, accessed through a free app for Apple and Android, is used to scan a special icon that appears in four places in the guide. Scanning the image identified by the icon gives the user access to 3D animations, 360˚ videos and more. Users of the guide are able to take a walk in the landscape of Virginia Falls and see a caribou stand on a page of the guide, in example. 
  Download the app and look for the icons in the Explorers' Guide to experience the Spectacular NWT via augmented reality. 
  
  Download the app here:
  Apple 
  Android
• In February, a Spectacular NWT Virtual Reality car, decked out in an Aurora decal wrap and equipped with a 360-Degree Virtual Reality (VR) Video headset, will hit the streets of Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary. The VR car will give lucky passengers the chance to ride along with a migrating reindeer herd, to stand above thundering Virginia Falls, and feel what it’s like to paddle a glassy alpine lake under a midnight sun. 
• Immersive Virtual Reality experiences will be offered at three travel tradeshows in Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary, to bring potential visitors as close to the spectacular NWT attractions as you can get without physically being here. 
• Visitors to the NWT Tourism booth at the tradeshows will also have a chance to win one of four trips, each showcasing a different region of the NWT.
• Residents in the NWT rarely get a chance to see the work NWT Tourism does because marketing efforts are directed to potential visitors outside of the territory. One exception to this is residents may get a glimpse of an Aurora-wrapped vehicle in and around Yellowknife starting in January. The vehicle will be part of the Hertz fleet and will be used whenever possible by NWT Tourism when we are hosting travel trade and travel media guests of NWT Tourism. When not in use for this purpose, the wrapped vehicle will form part of the regular rental fleet offered by Hertz rentals and can be used by anyone renting from them. 

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Quote:
"This is an example of NWT Tourism using the latest technology to make the transformative power of a visit to the Northwest Territories more tangible to potential visitors - and, it's a great deal of fun. A picture is indeed worth a thousand words, and from our point of view augmented reality and virtual reality are worth far more" said Cathie Bolstad, Chief Executive Officer of NWT Tourism. "We couldn't undertake complex, technologically innovative, and multi-pronged campaigns such as this without the funding support from the GNWT-ITI, our core funding partner, and from CanNor which supported the new technology aspects of this campaign." 

For more information please contact:
Julie Warnock
Communications Officer
NWT Tourism
julie@spectacularnwt.com
867-873-5007