By Justin Crann

BMO is testing new channels with the latest installment in its “Barrier Breakers” campaign, from the small screen to the big screen.

The latest edition builds on the strategy that the bank has been unrolling with this content series, which spotlights women-owned businesses and the challenges they have overcome on their path to success. This edition showcases Joella Hogan, the Indigenous owner of Yukon Soaps. It shows hurdles that Hogan herself has faced over the last two decades trying to launch that enterprise while based in a small, northern Canadian community.

But this story is different in a number of key ways, says Shelley Johnsen, BMO’s brand director, including how it is getting it in front of Canadians.

The campaign, which launched last week, includes the usual two minute film with 30- and 15-second cutdowns in a media buy handled by UM Canada. Along with the usual media mix for this series, which includes targeted social and YouTube “to get it in front of people most likely to sit with the content and consume it,” UM has also added connected TV and streaming placements through CBC Gem and Roku to the buy.

“Initially, we thought this would be a great test and learn and extend our reach because it couldn’t hurt,” Johnsen explains. “But we got a note from Cassandra [Sole, Hogan’s long-time banker at BMO] the day of the app launch that Joella’s ecommerce site had seen the biggest spike it had ever seen. So there was an immediate response to the film. For us, that was such a win.”

The strong uptake on the film by audiences – as translated into business for Yukon Soaps – is indicative of an “appetite” for this kind of content, Johnsen suggests: “There’s been a lot of dialogue around what reconciliation looks like for Canada, and being able to get an eye into these types of Indigenous stories is something consumers are interested in at this stage in the cultural conversation.”

As such, Hogan’s story has also been cut into a nearly 12-minute short documentary film. The short film will be submitted to several film festivals as the bank looks for new ways to present its content to broader audiences.

The reason BMO and creative agency FCB Canada were able to also make a documentary is because of the other big difference in this edition of the ongoing campaign: how long the team spent with their subject and in her community.

Most of the time, Johnsen says, the bank’s brand team and FCB will spend a day with the entrepreneurs featured in “Breaking Barriers” gathering footage of their business and community. Because they had to take a trip to the Yukon and spent time in an isolated community with limited beds – the team that went was a “skeleton crew” of only the most essential members – they spent a full three days in the community interviewing Hogan, which gave the team a rich well of footage from which to draw. It also gave them a fuller picture of who Hogan is.

“Joella isn’t just a businessperson, she’s a force through her entire community,” explains Johnsen. “She’s rooted her business in Indigenous culture and she really promotes the three tenets of pushing forward the Indigenous agenda in the business community: Reclamation, she uses the physical land in the product; Employment, she’s employing the local community with a focus on the Indigenous women community; and then Reconciliation, which she strives for through both economics – getting  her business and employees entrenched in the local community – but also through the preservation of culture, and in particular, their language.”