Goat on a horse promotes tourism for Newfoundland. Literally.

These days, the quirky and cute works, especially if you can make it into a video, upload to YouTube and get it to go viral. That’s what Newfoundland & Labrador tourism, already slightly off-kilter when it comes to its tourism ads, is going for with a new hit: goat on a horse.

And that’s what the ad is, a baby goat on a horse, caught inadvertently on camera in 2011 while filming another tourism commercial, which makes for a cute moment in a picturesque remote location. It didn’t think much of it, but when NewFoundland’s social media team saw goats trending online, they decided to release the ad now.

Newfoundland tourism is savvy enough to milk this moment for all its worth, tying it with its half-an-hour-behind-U.S.-and-Canada-eastern-time-means-slowing-down “Find Yourself” theme it has been working with since 2007.

At the very edge of the continent, half an hour off kilter with the rest of the world, there’s a tendency towards the unexpected.
While filming a commercial for Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism, the crew spotted these two unlikely friends near Cape St. Mary’s Ecological Reserve on the southwestern part of the Avalon Peninsula. Which begs the question, what else would you expect in a place with its very own time zone?

Not this would would have any effect on Newfoundland’s tourism numbers, but any exposure is good exposure in destination marketing, right? Almost, but not as cute as the VisitScotland’s Shetland-ponies-in-cardigans ad campaign.