From runners to mindfulness communities to outdoor socialisers, this campaign gave young people a reason to visit England's forests. It also proved something the numbers made impossible to ignore: creator content, run as paid media, outperformed traditional brand ads by up to 5x.
The Brief
Forestry England manage some of England's most spectacular woodlands. But young people aren't visiting enough, and the brand wasn't on their radar. Autumn, the most photogenic and shareable season, was the moment to change that.
The brief was to make Forestry England synonymous with the season. Not just visible in it, but owning it. And to do that, the campaign needed voices who young people already trusted.
The Project
We mapped four communities with different reasons to be in a forest: runners and hikers, mindfulness practitioners, adventurers, and outdoor socialisers. Then we found creators who genuinely lived inside each of them.
Partners such as Wanderers Of Colour brought a community built around inclusivity in the outdoors, people for whom the English countryside hadn't always felt welcoming. Jordan Searby brought credibility with an active audience, many of whom already trail run. Several more creators joined for follow-up content, each visiting a forest local to them.
Our central campaign shoot took place in the New Forest. Creators styled themselves authentically, and came with their own communities, and their own sense of how to move through a forest. We briefed the frame; they filled it.
After the shoot, each creator made follow-up content from a forest near them showing autumn calling them from the city to the woodlands. The campaign ran that content natively on their platforms and as paid media ads, alongside brand-directed creative.
The Impact
The campaign showed the power of influencer-driven content to convert, not just build brands.
The gap in performance was striking. Influencer content delivered two to five times higher click-through rates than the brand-led material. On TikTok, CTR from creator content reached 9.41% higher than the traditional brand-world driven creative assets.
When the same voices that built trust with an audience are the ones inviting them somewhere, people go. Forestry England are extending the campaign into 2026, which says more than any metric.
Talent Credits
Jordan Searby
Wanderers Of Colour
Fleur Radford
Tinuke Oyediran
Rebekah Zeena Jade
Emily Explores
Hiked Up
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