In Colombia’s eastern plains, amid the sunlit savannas and slow-moving rivers of Casanare, Belcy Cerón chose a path few others dared. As neighbors cleared forest for rice and cattle, she let the wild stay wild, preserving patches of land that are home to howler monkeys, eagles, and woodpeckers.

"Many neighbors say that my property is not productive, that there are too many trees," Cerón says in a cinematic YouTube video that was recently produced by WhereNext Creative. "But for us, it is a great property, because we are surrounded by tranquility. We have oxygen, nature, and a cooler climate."

Her quiet path is part of a broader movement taking root in Colombia’s Orinoquía region, a mosaic of savannas, wetlands, and forests that is home to some of the planet’s most unique and threatened ecosystems. Over the past five years, 107 families across the region have signed voluntary conservation agreements as part of the World Wildlife Fund’s GEF Orinoquia project, preserving more than 74,000 hectares of land, an area roughly the size of New York City.

But preserving landscapes isn’t enough. If people who have never been to a place are going to care about it, they first need to feel connected. That’s where storytelling comes in.

Why We Made Parientes

WWF Colombia partnered with WhereNext Creative to bring the stories of these unsung conservationists to life in a way that’s both cinematic and deeply human.

The result was Parientes, an integrated digital content library and storytelling campaign that includes:

• Four mini documentary films

• A three-part podcast series

• A photo and video archive

• An animated explainer video

The creative concept, developed by WhereNext Creative’s in-house team, was inspired by the regional word pariente, used affectionately in Colombia’s eastern plains to mean “relative” or “close friend.” It became the emotional thread linking all formats of the campaign.

Interview subjects were asked: What does "pariente" mean to you? Their answers revealed a shift in perception, as many now consider the rivers, forests, and animals not as resources, but as family.

"Through this series, we are showing our partners and the general public that you can make a good living while helping to preserve the environment," said Paula Andrea Siabato, WWF’s Communications Coordinator in Colombia.

REAL Audio + Video Natural History Production for YouTube

WhereNext Creative’s strength lies in merging journalistic depth with beautiful visual and audio storytelling, an approach honed through past projects like The Birders and our Netflix audio catalog for One Hundred Years of Solitude.

WWF, which is known around the world for its giant panda logo, said that it wanted the videos to reflect the cinematic standards that the organization’s media products have also become known for.

To achieve that, WhereNext Creative sent a light and fast team of experienced natural history creators: a videographer, photographer, and audio technician to the field.

Long lenses were used to capture inspiring shots of the birds and mammals of the Orinoquía. Drones were used to capture the region’s immense landscapes, and specialized microphones were used to record everything from the croaking of frogs in protected areas to the bubbling sounds of the Bita River.

“We didn’t use stock audio or foley because we know that authentic sound matters. When combined with strong visuals, real audio helps create a deeper emotional connection, especially on platforms like YouTube where viewers engage through multiple senses. And that connection is what makes people care about conservation,” said Sandra Eichmann, WhereNext Creative's General Manager, who led the production.

Impact That Lasts Beyond the Scroll

Unlike fleeting campaigns designed to ride a trend, Parientes was built for longevity. WWF wanted these stories to live on, not just in social feeds, but in classrooms, rural meetings, donor briefings, and search results.

Siabato said, “The videos and podcasts were placed on YouTube because of the evergreen nature of the content produced, so that people who are interested in conservation can find them for years to come."

But she also expects the videos and the podcasts to be shown at events with donors or stakeholders, where they can be used as conversation starters.

For the WWF team in Colombia, the aim of the series is threefold:

• Inspiration for rural communities beginning their own sustainable development journeys.

• Evidence for donors and stakeholders to visualize conservation impact.

• Awareness for Colombians unfamiliar with the culture and ecology of the eastern plains.

"We want them to get to know that part of the country, and the families that are taking a shot at preserving it," Siabato said.

Why It Matters for the Future of Storytelling

This campaign underscores a central belief at WhereNext Creative: beautiful content alone isn’t enough. To create impact, you must spark an emotional connection. That’s why our studio creates Content with Soul, campaigns designed to resonate across years, not days.

This work was also designed for the world’s most enduring content and search platform, YouTube, where we know both beautiful audio and video work together to create a more connected and lasting experience.

And it’s a blueprint we’re scaling, with the right partners.

Cristiano Portis has a pretty adventurous job. He travels the globe in search of the world’s finest coffee beans, visiting farms in remote regions of Brazil, Colombia, and Vietnam that are steeped in coffee tradition.

As the lead Coffee Designer for 1895, a specialty coffee brand created by Italian roaster Lavazza, Portis identifies high-quality beans and develops unique roasts with notes of cacao, red plum, or tropical fruits, adding new possibilities to consumers’ palates.

The 1895 brand is growing steadily in Lavazza's home country of Italy and other parts of Europe, as people seek new ways of consuming coffee that go beyond the intense and bitter flavor of an espresso.

Portis says there is still a lot of work to do to create greater awareness about coffee and educate consumers about all the options available to them.

Portis and Lavazza’s 1895 brand has recently partnered with WhereNext to further educate consumers about the origins and possibilities of coffee.

The alliance was centered around a specialty coffee blend that 1895 launched last year with Yannick Alléno, a celebrity chef from France, who has won 17 Michelin stars, and is famous for experimenting with fermented ingredients in his sauces.

The Yannick Alléno 1895 Signature Blend is a dark roast with notes of dried plums and cacao, crafted from fermented coffee beans sourced from Colombia, Guatemala, and Brazil.

To promote the blend and teach customers about its origins, Alleno travelled to the Finca El Paraíso in Colombia’s Cauca province, where coffee grower Diego Bermudez has been experimenting with fermentation techniques for years.

WhereNext documented Chef Alleno’s trip to Colombia and produced a short film about his encounter with Bermudez and the farm workers.

A series of short, vertical videos and still photos was also produced for 1895’s Instagram account, introducing viewers to Finca El Paraíso and showcasing how coffee is grown, tested, and prepared before being shipped to 1895’s roasting facility in Turin, helping to deepen appreciation for the brand.

Hero video of the video series produced by WhereNext for 1895 Coffee Designers by Lavazza.

Sandra Eichmann, WhereNext’s General Manager, said that filming Chef Alleno’s visit to Finca El Paraíso was a “challenging” assignment because the team only had two days in the field to work with the busy chef. However, it was a project that also showcased WhereNext's "capability to deliver a quality product, while working with brands and people that are known around the world.” 

The videos feature drone shots, interviews, and high-resolution footage of the coffee-growing process, which helps transport viewers to Finca El Paraíso.

Eichmann said WhereNext drew on over a decade of experience producing cinematic assets for leading international brands, including Abercrombie & Kent, Nescafe, and Christian Dior, to quickly assemble a team capable of capturing the story behind the 1895 Signature Blend. Rather than focusing on consumer education, the film centered on the encounter between Chef Yannick Alléno and coffee innovator Diego Bermúdez, as well as the creative vision of Cristiano Portis, the lead coffee designer of 1895.

In projects like The Birders or Inmense Orinoquia, a series about environmental defenders produced for the World Wildlife Fund, WhereNext has also developed the expertise to create stories centered around interesting personalities.

Cristiano Portis, the Lavazza Coffeeelier, said that the videos of chef Alleno’s trip to Finca El Paraíso align neatly with his company’s goal of educating consumers about coffee.

He envisions a future where customers in Europe can discern between the different types of beans and blends on the market and make purchasing decisions that are not just based on price, but also on quality. “For us, it's very important to describe who the producer is, the terroir, and the community behind the coffee,” Portis said.

He added that he would like to produce more documentary-style videos about the coffee growers that Lavazza works with, so that people can understand where coffee comes from, just as they understand how wine is made. And to distinguish a Geisha from a Bourbon coffee, just as easily as they recognize the difference between a Merlot and a Cabernet Sauvignon.

He said that videos of places like Finca El Paraíso are an asset not just for Lavazza, but for the coffee industry as a whole.

“It’s something that also benefits the small roaster,” Portis said. “We have the ability to send the message and to reach more people, but the small roaster also benefits from more discerning customers.”

BOGOTÁ, Colombia (May 2025) — WhereNext Creative is proud to announce it has been awarded a new three-year contract to lead both video production and social media strategy for CEELA Phase II—an international initiative advancing energy efficiency in buildings across Latin America. The comprehensive engagement, led by EBP, Colbun, and Carbon Trust, and funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), marks a significant milestone for WhereNext Creative as it doubles down on its mission to amplify purpose-driven work in the Americas and beyond.

Under this contract, WhereNext will produce a suite of strategic deliverables, including a documentary-style video series shot across Colombia, Mexico, Ecuador, and Peru, as well as over 75 video capsules, infographics, animations, and social media campaigns tailored to LinkedIn and Facebook. The creative concept—“Construir ideas para cambiar vidas” (“Building Ideas to Change Lives”)—will spotlight human-centered stories that champion collaboration, equity, education, and sustainable construction.

Animated video created for Project CEELA and Minergie, a Swiss certification standard for sustainable urban development, focused on minimizing energy consumption, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and promoting energy-efficient and comfortable living spaces.

“Winning this dual contract is about more than just new work; it’s a reaffirmation of what we’re capable of as a multidisciplinary team,” said Sandra Eichmann, General Manager and Executive Producer at WhereNext Creative. “After our incredible run with USAID’s Destination Nature, this moment energizes us. It proves we’ve built a resilient and world-class agency, one trusted to carry forward complex international missions with empathy, strategy, and cinematic flair.”

This win follows WhereNext’s acclaimed campaign Finding Encanto—a Cannes Corporate Media & TV Award winner—and recent sustainability and natural history-focused content for WWF, WRI, Netflix, and Swisscontact. With a 30+ country footprint and bilingual production teams embedded across the region, WhereNext Creative remains uniquely positioned to deliver impact through storytelling in Latin America and beyond.

About CEELA

CEELA (Strengthening capacities for energy-efficiency in buildings in Latin America) is a regional initiative working to advance energy efficiency in buildings while promoting climate protection, economic development, and social inclusion. Funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), CEELA supports public institutions, industry professionals, and decision-makers across the Andean and Central American regions. CEELA fosters regional knowledge exchange, builds technical capacity, and develops exemplary projects in architecture and urban planning to scale low-carbon construction practices and improve living conditions throughout Latin America. For more information, visit www.proyectoceela.com and their profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook.

About WhereNext Creative

WhereNext Creative is the storytelling and design agency within the WhereNext Group, a global network of creative companies with offices in Seattle, Washington, and Bogotá, Colombia. Focused on bold, human-centered storytelling, WhereNext Creative partners with purpose-driven brands, destinations, and development organizations to craft compelling narratives across digital, print, and experiential platforms. Learn more at wherenext.com.

For more information contact:

Alejandro Rivera, Communications Coordinator

alejandror@wherenext.com

The screaming piha is a grey feathered bird that has pretty average looks.

But it has a loud, and rhythmic call that evokes a sense of suspense, and has turned it into a Hollywood favorite.

Listen carefully, and you will find the screaming piha’s mating call blended into various movies that are set in tropical jungles.

Apocalypse Now uses recordings of the screaming piha as it transports viewers to the tense rainforest of Vietnam. And in 1492 you can hear the little bird scream, as Columbus and his crew tread carefully through the jungles of Hispaniola.

But there’s a problem here – the Screaming Piha only lives in the rainforests of South America.

Our agency helped Netflix avoid such embarrassing blunders as it made its widely acclaimed adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The series is set in Colombia’s Caribbean region, just like the famous and beloved novel it’s based on.

We traveled to that part of Colombia and recorded the natural sounds of more than 90 species of birds, amphibians, mammals, and insects, which were later included in the soundscape of the series.

“Having the correct ambient sound is extremely important for productions of this caliber,” WhereNext CEO Gregg Bleakney said. “Because sound gives your audience a deeper and more accurate connection with the place you’re showing. It helps to take you there.”

The natural history sounds collected by WhereNext gave the locations depicted in the series a more earthy feel that takes viewers back to 19th-century Colombia.

For example, the squawks of parrots in the fictional town of Macondo come from parrots in Colombia’s Caribbean region.

And when you see the series, you might even notice birds chirping in the courtyard of the Buendia Family or frogs croaking during night scenes that evoke life in rural Colombia.

Our agency got pulled into the magical world of One Hundred Years of Solitude at the beginning of last year when the series was in its post-production phase.

La Tina, the company in charge of sound post-production for the series, noticed that most of the scenes for One Hundred Years of Solitude were filmed in a set in central Colombia, which has birds, insects, and amphibians that are not quite the same as those of the Colombian Caribbean.

They contacted WhereNext to see what could be done to help the series sound more authentic.

“They reached out to us because we have a decade of experience in making nature documentaries,” like The Birders, a 2019 film on birdwatching routes in Colombia, said Sandra Eichmann, WhereNext’s General Manager.

Hundreds of bird species were filmed for that documentary ―which was part of a tourism promotion campaign for Colombia’s government.

To collect a new set of sounds for One Hundred Years of Solitude, WhereNext put together a team led by Eichmann and Diego Calderón, a biologist and bird specialist who has been researching Colombia’s bird life for over two decades.

Before heading out to the field, Calderón met with the audio post-production team to develop a list of birds that could be included in the soundscapes of One Hundred Years of Solitude and even brainstorm species whose songs could be used as background sounds for some of the characters.

“There is a gypsy called Melquiades who is always bringing new inventions into Macondo,” Calderón said. “So we wanted to accompany him with a futuristic or metallic sort of background sound, and we thought that something perfect for him would be the song of the Gulungo” a species of Oropendola, found on the Caribbean coast.

WhereNext’s team spent five days in Northern Colombia recording the sounds of more than 90 species of birds, five species of amphibians, two kinds of monkeys, and four types of insects.

Calderón said he had to be careful to find birds in places that were not disturbed by the sounds of motorcycles or radios, since those are noises that did not exist in 19th century Colombia, the period in which One Hundred Years of Solitude takes place.

It was an intense undertaking that could only be done in such a short time because of Calderón’s knowledge of local ecosystems, and his familiarity with birding routes in the north of Colombia.

Eichmann has also produced television series and natural history documentary films in the region, and deployed a network of local fixers for this project, who know the best places and the best times to find certain species of birds.

After the fieldwork was finished, WhereNext’s team made an audio library, with all the recordings gathered in the Caribbean region.

The tracks were delivered to the projects postproduction audio editors with information that would help them decide which scenes they would work best for, such as what altitudes different birds live at, what kind of environment they are likely to be found in, and whether a certain type of bird sings in the day or at night.

Eichmann said that WhereNext was able to take on this project, because it is an agency that has become accustomed to making stories that are “centered around nature.”

WhereNext recently made a series of videos for the World Wildlife Fund that feature the stories of  environmental leaders who are working to preserve natural habitats. 

And thanks to the success of The Birders, the agency also pioneered a YouTube series known as The Birders Show, that has filmed more than 60 episodes about birding locations in five different countries.

Bleakney said that the role of sound in films, should never be underestimated. And he warns that filmmakers should lay their hands off the screaming piha, unless they’re making stories set in South American rainforests.

“So much of the feeling you get as a traveller is not just visual, it’s the audio,” Bleakney said. “This project with One Hundred Years of Solitude was an opportunity for us to further promote Colombia to the world through our own hidden soundscape.”

WhereNext seeks projects that drive meaningful global impact. Our involvement in events like COP16 reflects our dedication to protecting ecosystems, promoting sustainable practices, and fostering positive change. By collaborating with our partners at the world’s largest biodiversity conference, we actively contribute to shaping solutions for a more sustainable future.

As nations worldwide race to meet environmental commitments, delegates from more than 190 countries gathered in the Colombian city of Cali in October for the United Nations' 2024 Biodiversity Conference.

In the gathering, known as COP16, delegates discussed new ways to help developing nations fund their conservation efforts and meet a target established by UN member states two years ago to set aside 30% of the earth’s surface for nature by the end of this decade.

Meanwhile, hundreds of events were organized on the sidelines of these negotiations, where scientists, business leaders, environmental activists, and policymakers discussed ways to preserve critical ecosystems and contribute to the recovery of plant and animal life around the planet.

Three of our partners ran activities during COP16 that focused on promoting nature tourism (USAID), developing sustainable construction methods (CEELA), and creating supply chains for tropical crops to help communities live off the rainforest without destroying it (Colombia + Competitiva).

WhereNext deployed our team of sustainable tourism experts, advertising creatives, videographers, social media specialists, and graphic designers to help our partners amplify their message, launch new initiatives, and connect with allies working to preserve biodiversity.

Here's how we helped our clients to stand out during this massive international event:

Destination Nature – Challenging Colombians to travel in a more adventurous way

Destination Nature, a USAID project that supports the development of nature tourism in Colombia, ran a busy program during COP16. This included numerous panels on sustainable tourism policies, biodiverse destinations, and local tour companies' challenges.

The project also launched a new campaign during COP16 that encourages Colombians to spend their holidays in nature destinations like jungles, cloud forests, and remote beaches. Tourism income gives local communities an incentive to preserve fragile ecosystems.

Before COP16 began, we developed a creative concept for this new campaign: “Colombiamorphosis.”

The campaign and its flagship video were presented in a panel led by Colombian TV presenter and environmental activist Claudia Bahamon, Simon Mejia, the producer of the internationally acclaimed tropical fusion band Bomba Stereo, and Destination Nature Chief of Party Julián Guerrero.

Thanks to its timing, thoughtful content, and association with local celebrities, Colombian media outlets widely covered the campaign launch.

WhereNext also worked with Destination Nature to boost the visibility of small companies developing nature tourism experiences in rural areas of Colombia, giving locals an economic incentive to preserve natural habitats.

Through a campaign developed by our in-house creative team and led by WhereNext Creative Director Edwar Jaramillo, Hosts by Nature, or Anfitriones por Naturaleza, Destination Nature invited rural tourism entrepreneurs to attend the COP16 event, where they met other donors and potential customers.

The Hosts by Nature program participants were also featured in a video produced by our production team and shared on USAID’s social media platforms. Some routes they offer were also included in a guide to Cali and Colombia produced by Cali’s municipal government, published online, and handed out to all conference delegates.

Jaramillo explained that including the Hosts by Nature entrepreneurs in this guidebook exemplified our communications agency’s “360 approach.”

“Our first job is to develop interesting messages and concepts for our clients, and then we find different ways for these ideas to land on our audiences, whether through a video, book, or conference. It's about having versatility.”

In addition to promoting Destination Nature activities, WhereNext led its tourism-related event. Julian Manrique, the director of photography for our YouTube series, The Birders Show, led a panel on bird photography for beginners.

With ten thousand subscribers on YouTube and dozens of episodes recorded in Colombia’s top birdwatching spots, the show is one of WhereNext’s passion projects. During his COP16 lecture, Manrique shared some of the basics of bird photography with the general public, fueling their interest in conservation and encouraging them to head into Colombia’s rainforests and cloud forests to make their own bird photos.

Colombia + Competitiva – Promoting the demand for bioingredients

While some team members focused on helping Destination Nature make the most of COP16, others worked with Colombia + Competitiva (A More Competitive Colombia), an international development project financed by the Swiss Government’s Secretariat for Economic Affairs. The project is boosting sustainable and inclusive growth in Colombia.

Colombia + Competitiva, or C+C, organized a series of panels and conferences on the sidelines of the COP16 negotiations. Experts discussed the challenges of building sustainable business that benefit from biodiversity.

The project also launched an online catalog of tropical fruits and seeds, known as “bioingredients,” that communities in Colombia and elsewhere in South America are increasingly harvesting to live off rainforests without destroying them. These bio ingredients include edible fruits, like the Amazonian acai berry, but also fruits and nuts that are used by companies around the world to make soap, shampoo, makeup, and textiles.

WhereNext’s communication team covered C+C’s events at the conference with carefully crafted LinkedIn and X posts that mixed text, graphics, and photos. These posts garnered over 25,000 organic impressions on LinkedIn, a key platform for C+C.

We also designed two newsletters that covered C+C’s events at COP16 and were sent to a mailing list of stakeholders, as well as an additional newsletter promoting the new catalog of bioingredients. The document includes QR codes that readers can use to connect with companies harvesting Amazonian products like Acai, Sacha Inchi, and Achiote.

CEELA – Making the connection between sustainable construction and biodiversity preservation

CEELA is a project financed by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation that focuses on strengthening Latin American countries' capacity to build energy-efficient buildings.

The project’s leaders participated in several COP16 events and helped Cali’s municipal government launch a certification program for sustainable buildings—such as those constructed with low carbon emissions and designed with materials that reduce the need for air conditioning in Cali’s hot tropical climate.

Our communications team developed a strategy for CEELA that included using graphics and photos to cover the certification program launch on the agency’s social media platforms. We also highlighted CEELA’s presence at the event and boosted communication with the agency’s followers.

CEELA staff were encouraged to record videos of themselves at the event, which WhereNext’s social media team edited. In the videos, the CEELA specialists answered questions about the link between sustainable construction and the preservation of biodiversity.

A recent episode of The Birders Show featuring Doña Dora’s birdwatching venture that has helped her family emerge from poverty and transition from subsistence farmers to small entrepreneurs.

Dora Londoño’s small house is located along a remote stretch of a stomach-churning but scenic road that runs next to the Farallones National Park.

Recently, it’s become a birdwatching mecca for tourists who make day trips from the nearby city of Cali and arrive as early as 6 a.m.

After sipping coffee and trying Londoño’s hearty empanadas, visitors head to a small terrace on the back end of the house. The terrace faces a lush cloud forest with a treasure trove of surprises.

Within minutes, visitors can spot several species of hummingbirds buzzing around and inserting their needle-like beaks into feeders that Dora has set up in her backyard.

Half a dozen larger species perch on the trees that tower above the small house, like golden tanagers and green honeycreepers, which swoop in to nibble on small pieces of banana and papaya left for them on the branches.

Londoño, affectionately known as Doña Dora, charges visitors a small entrance fee and sells them breakfast and lunch.

For this longtime resident of the Farallones region, birdwatching has become a profitable way of life, encouraging her and her neighbors to preserve the local forest.

“I never believed so many people would come here just to see birds,” Londoño said in a recent episode of The Birders Show, WhereNext’s YouTube series dedicated to making birding more accessible to everyone.

“People who come here tell their friends about our place and make posts about us on social media. And now I can say I make a living from birds. And not just me. My family and my children are also involved.”

Doña Dora’s birdwatching venture has helped her family emerge from poverty and transition from subsistence farmers to small entrepreneurs.

The small business also highlights the potential of birdwatching as a sustainable source of income for rural communities, says Diego Calderon, a biologist and nature guide who has led birding tours of Colombia since 2007.

“I think businesses like these are laudable and worthy of applause,” Calderon said. “It’s a beautiful way for people to feel empowered and exercise sovereignty over their territory.”

Colombia has become increasingly popular among birdwatchers worldwide since a peace deal was signed in 2016 between the government and the FARC guerilla group, making rural areas rich in wildlife more accessible to all.

The government has also invested in campaigns promoting the country as an ecotourism and birdwatching destination, highlighting that Colombia is home to around 2000 bird species, more than any other country.

Calderon, who is also the host of The Birders Show and a consultant for WhereNext, warns that building a successful birdwatching venture takes time and requires a specific set of conditions.

“Many people think that if you live in Colombia and have a farm where there are some birds, you’re set, and you will have tourists visiting you because this is the country of birds,” Calderon said. “But it’s not that simple.”

According to Calderon, some factors entrepreneurs should consider when trying to set up a birdwatching venture are its accessibility, whether it is located along established birdwatching routes, and whether it can provide visitors with the opportunity to view species that cannot be found elsewhere.

This last item is particularly important for attracting more specialized birdwatchers, who tend to spend the most money on their trips.

“Not all of the rural places in Colombia have the same potential for bird tourism,” Calderon said.

In Doña Dora's case, her home’s location, just 55km away from the city of Cali, helps to lure visitors who can come to the area on day trips. She also benefits from being on a route known as the Anchicaya Canyon, where there are other spots that are popular with tourists and birders.

Another big advantage of Doña Dora’s place is the presence of the Toucan Barbet, a colorful and clownish species that can only be found in Colombia and Ecuador.

Over the years, Doña Dora’s has built a reputation as the best place to spot this comical and exotic bird, which is featured in one of the murals on the home’s colorful facade.

Her children found a family of toucan barbets nesting near their property. When the tree the toucans were nesting on fell, they took it closer to the house so the birds could build another nest there.

“Doña Dora and her family have been very good at reading birdwatcher's needs,” said Calderon, who has also led birdwatching expeditions in a dozen Latin American countries, including Mexico, Panama, Venezuela, and Peru.

Calderon has also worked with former members of the FARC guerrilla group who are setting up ecotourism projects. The biologist and guide advised the former rebels on how to cater to tourists' needs and joined them on birdwatching outings.

Back in 2004, when Calderon was a biology student, he was kidnapped by the FARC while he was on an expedition in northeastern Colombia.

Calderon, a botany professor, and a local guide were held by the rebels, who initially believed they were spies but then held the group for ransom.

Meanwhile, scientists in Colombia and abroad held protests to seek their release.

Calderon said that being held hostage for 88 days made him more “stoic” and “patient” when it comes to tackling life’s challenges. It also made him curious about working with the former rebels after they made their peace with the government.

Following the 2016 peace deal, many of the FARC rebels moved into small villages with prefabricated homes known as ETCRs, where they started to set up agricultural, industrial, and ecotourism projects.

So far, Calderon says that an ETCR in the north of Colombia, known as Tierra Grata, has the potential to make an income from birdwatching because it is located along another route popular with birdwatchers.

In the dry forests surrounding the Tierra Grata ETCR, a rare ground-dwelling bird known as the Red-Legged Tinamou, along with other endemic and rare species, can also be spotted.

“What they need there now is someone who really takes on the responsibility for a birdwatching project,” Calderon said.

Diego Calderón was researching birds in a remote area of Colombia when he was kidnapped by FARC. Years later, he returned to meet former FARC members and find some meaning in what happened.

As the host of The Birders Show, Calderon is constantly looking for new ventures that can be featured on the YouTube series, financed by WhereNext and sponsored by provincial governments and tourism boards that want to attract more visitors to their regions.

Currently, The Birders Show is planning a series of episodes with the Colombian Department of Caldas that will feature some of the smaller, family-owned lodges in that region.

“You need several elements to come together” for a successful birding venture, Calderon said. “But when it happens, it is something beautiful to behold.”

A video and photographic series to preserve 'South America’s Serengeti.'

Watch the video series in Spanish HERE.

The Orinoco River basin covers a fifth of Colombia’s territory. It is surrounded by immense savannahs and tropical forests that are home to more than 3,900 species of plants and animals, including capybaras, caimans, giant anteaters, and macaws.

Unfortunately, this fascinating region, which has been nicknamed the Serengeti of South America, has also been developed in a disorderly way, with oil companies, palm plantations, settlers, and wildcat miners threatening its ecosystems and polluting local sources of water.

The World Wildlife Fund has been working in the Orinoco region for more than a decade to set up private nature reserves and help local farmers, fishermen, and cattle ranchers live more sustainably off the land.

Recently, the Fund hired WhereNext to produce four mini-documentary films about local people who have made massive efforts to preserve the Orinoco’s plains and live in harmony with nature.

“These are stories from remote places, where people are implementing sustainable forms of living despite facing many difficulties,” said Santiago Ospina, the director of the four-part series, which is now on YouTube.

“Through these stories, we want to motivate more people in the Orinoco to join conservation efforts and encourage people in other parts of the world to consider how they can help preserve the ecosystems around them.”

One of the videos features the story of Libia and Yanire Arismendi, two sisters who resisted offers by Colombia’s oil industry to drill on their family’s ranch in Casanare province and have instead turned their property into a sustainable farming and nature reserve.

Another video follows veterinarian and cattle rancher Francisco Sandoval. He explains how he grows his food without chemicals and has learned to “interpret nature” by rearing his cows in the savannah without destroying nearby forests.

WhereNext’s team also visited the remote Vichada province, along Colombia’s eastern border with Venezuela, to document the story of a fisherman who protects local riverbeds by planting trees and helps sustain populations of ornamental fish species in high demand worldwide.

We also filmed the story of a couple that set up an organic cashew farm in Vichada with WWF's help while preserving forests that are home to deer and tapirs.

These stories are part of the communications component of the Orinoquia Integrated Sustainable Landscapes initiative, a multimillion-dollar project funded by the Global Environment Facility and implemented by WWF.

The project has helped local farmers and cattle ranchers establish and manage nature reserves in the Orinoco region, where there are currently more than 130 privately owned reserves that cover 138,000 hectares, an area twice the size of New York City.

The videos will also be shown by the Regional System of Protected Areas (SIRAP), a group that holds regular meetings that bring together farmers, scientists, park rangers, and others interested in the Orinoco’s sustainable development.

“The idea of these videos is to go beyond the numbers and technical documents and show, in a more emotional way, the impact that these initiatives have on people's lives,” said Carolina Muñoz, WhereNext’s project manager.

She explained that the agency—which started out by making videos for cycling companies and outdoor clothing brands—is increasingly working on video campaigns that promote sustainable development programs.

Another series of videos for Destination Nature, a USAID-funded effort to promote ecotourism in areas of Colombia that are emerging from decades of violence, is currently in the making.

For that project, WhereNext crews have already visited rainforests and archeological sites in the provinces of Guaviare, Putumayo, and Cauca, where locals are transitioning from working in extractive industries to a sustainable tourism economy.

Muñoz said that some of the videos from these places will be part of a campaign to attract more tourists to these sites, in which a local airline company is also participating.

WhereNext is also working on a series of seven videos for Swiss Contact that highlight the impact that the organization’s technical assistance projects are having on the lives of farmers in Colombia.

“These videos help reach the general public in a more friendly way,” Muñoz said. “But they also help you show the stakeholders who finance these projects what is being done with their investment and help attract additional support from policymakers and potential donors.”

Luis Armando Delgado with The Birders Show hosts Chris Bell and Diego Calderon. The show’s producers and sponsors planned THIS moment weeks in advance. It exemplifies a new communications methodology known as storydoing.

Luis Armando Delgado will never forget the moment he was given his first pair of binoculars. 

It happened in the middle of a humid rainforest on Colombia’s remote Pacific Coast, as the nature guide helped WhereNext film an episode of The Birders Show, a YouTube series that aims to make birding accessible to everyone—while promoting community-based tourism in Latin America. 

After he spotted a black-crowned antshrike among the lush trees that surround the village of San Cipriano, Armando was approached by the show’s co-host, Chris Bell. 

“These binoculars really make a difference, don’t they?” Bell said playfully, looking at the field lenses that Ruiz had borrowed from the production team. 

“Well, we were told that you are doing incredible work here and you love the birds,” Bell said. 

“And we have a deal with our friends at Kowa to support people and help inspire local birders all over Colombia…so these binoculars are yours.”

Ruiz hugged the show’s presenters as he heard the good news and shook his head in disbelief. Despite being a dedicated bird watcher and environmental leader in his native community of Venado Verde, the 32-year-old had never owned a pair of binoculars. 

They are difficult to find in rural Colombia. And their $400 or more price is out of reach for many villagers who sometimes struggle to make ends meet. “Now nobody will be able to drag me out of the rainforest,” Ruiz joked, adding that the new binoculars will also help educate children in his village who have developed an interest in birding and conservation. 

This moment, one of the most memorable scenes in a recent episode of The Birders Show, did not come about by chance. 

The show’s producers and sponsors planned it weeks in advance, and it exemplifies a new communications methodology known as storydoing.

Many definitions of storydoing have emerged online recently, including one that describes it as a strategy where audiences are encouraged to join in activities promoted by a specific brand, like a beach cleanup or a campaign to be more helpful to deaf people.

For our CEO Gregg Bleakney, storydoing involves designing campaigns or implementing development projects that don’t just tell viewers about a product or a place or apply quick-fix development solutions—but positively impact local communities over the long term through an approach that benefits all parties involved. 

In the private sector, for example, storydoing campaigns can link brands to purpose-driven activities that are positive for society.

“It would have been very easy for us to do a Kowa sponsorship bit for The Birders Show episodes with a simple host shout-out to the brand and showing them using binoculars in the field while discussing features and benefits,” Bleakney said.

“But we pushed ourselves and our clients to go further and find a way for the sponsorship to have a deeper benefit. Our producers found cases of people who would truly appreciate the gift and whose access to quality binoculars would have a multiplying effect. For example, in Luis Armando’s case, the binoculars will also help educate children in his community about the incredible biodiversity of their backyard.” 

Bleakney said that brands ultimately benefit from being associated with positive actions and altruistic goals.

“I think economically, we’re seeing that consumers are more willing to pay for products or experiences that are being developed with purpose," he said.

A Wildlife Center Of The North Coast volunteer releases a red-tailed hawk during a storydoing campaign produced for Cat Footwear. Cat and WhereNext donated $10,000 to the rescue center. The production won five Telly Awards

WhereNext also put this philosophy into practice during a campaign to promote Cat Stormers, a comfortable but sturdy waterproof work boot manufactured by Cat Footwear.

The company asked WhereNext to create a short documentary film and photography campaign to show the boots in action. 

“The classic way to do it would be to hire some models, take them to a work site with a lot of muck, and film them in a falsified work environment,” Bleakney said. But we decided to go further than that. 

Instead of hiring models for a shoot and “faking” the boots’ capabilities, WhereNext found a wildlife rescue center in Oregon where volunteers could really use the boots due to the perpetual rains and mud.

WhereNext filmed the inspirational story of the center’s young director and arranged for boots to be donated to all of the center’s volunteers, creating a situation where the brand was also helping the people at the wildlife rescue center carry out their important and altruistic mission. Cat and WhereNext later donated $10,000 to the rescue center, which would have been spent on model fees.

“Storydoing,” Bleakney said.

Recently, WhereNext has also been involved in government-sponsored tourism projects centered around storydoing, such as Finding Encanto, a campaign for ProColombia, the nation’s tourism and investment promotion agency. 

ProColombia asked us to develop a top-of-funnel campaign that would inspire people to visit Colombia and spend their money on community-based tourism projects rather than package tours involving big hotel chains.

WhereNext created a series of six videos in which travelers from different nations visited six regions of the country that ProColombia was promoting. 

But these weren’t just your typical influencers. Each traveler was selected for the campaign not just because of their social media fame but also because they were developing personal skills and had a clear purpose for going to Colombia. 

They included a Mexican muralist on a quest for artistic inspiration, a British DJ seeking to learn about the rhythms of Colombia’s Caribbean coast, and a wildlife photographer from Montana looking to expand his visual horizons.

At the end of their trips, the travelers all left something positive behind for the communities they visited. The Mexican artist, for example, painted a mural of a beloved community leader in Medellin who she befriended during the production. The DJ performed a free concert on the beach near Santa Marta with the tracks he had gathered during his travels.

Mexican artist Adry del Rocío painted a mural of a beloved community leader in Medellin who she befriended during our Cannes-award-winning storydoing production, Finding Encanto.

Besides benefiting the communities featured in the videos, these stories also make Colombia more appealing to people trying to better themselves and positively impact the communities they visit.

“What we did with that campaign was inspire people to visit places with a higher purpose…more than just seeing them and sharing a photo on Instagram,” Bleakney said. We want travelers to dream both about their personal journey and how they can positively contribute to the places they visit.”

WhereNext’s consultancy is also looking for ways to implement storydoing methodology for international development agencies as it works with more clients from this industry.

For example, the Swiss cooperation agency Swisscontact helps rural communities in Colombia find markets for products like organic coffee and cocoa and improve their production processes.

WhereNext creates social media posts, videos, and newsletters that showcase the impact of these projects on people's lives in a campaign known as the Competitive Colombia or "C+C" effect.  

“The idea is to engage decision-makers to continue to fund these kinds of projects,” Bleakney said. “So, instead of “telling” about numerical results, we design emotional “doing” stories that show the effect that these investments have had on people and help connect policymakers to their stories.”

Bleakney says that, ultimately, storydoing is about ensuring that everyone involved in a project benefits from the process. He is looking forward to working with more clients who have purpose-driven projects in mind.

“It’s setting a higher bar for our work,” Bleakney said. “And obsessing about how we make all of our projects mutually beneficial.”

In an advertising career spanning over two decades, Edwar Jaramillo cut his teeth at several Madison Avenue firms, helping their clients sell beauty creams, credit cards, and even toilet seats.

In 2022, he led a government-funded campaign called “Colombia, the Most Welcoming Place on Earth,” which helped to boost investment and tourism in the South American country. The work was inspired by research in which visitors to Colombia stated that friendliness was one of the outstanding characteristics of Colombian people.

In 2023, as ProColombia’s creative director, he worked with WhereNext to develop Colombia’s Cannes-award-winning Finding Encanto campaign.

Two months ago, Jaramillo joined WhereNext. As our creative director, he leads multiple campaigns that promote sustainable development in Colombia and worldwide—including Destination Nature, a forty-million-dollar effort to develop nature tourism in areas of the country that were hit heavily by the nation’s armed conflict.

We spoke with Jaramillo about how his work positively affects Colombia’s tourism prospects and the impact smaller, localized businesses like WhereNext are making in the global development and creative services industry.

How do you feel about your new role in WhereNext?

I’m very happy to be here because we are doing work that makes an impact. And we are not inventing stories, as happens often when you work with manufactured goods. Because our clients are innately purpose-driven, we focus on amplifying and communicating their existing narratives.

For example, I once worked with a beauty cream, and we built a fictional lab for their commercial. None of it was real—the lab, the people in it, nothing.

But here, it’s different.

With a tourism project I’m working on called Destination Nature (more below), we are helping communities in Colombia affected by the armed conflict identify, develop, and market attractions that already exist. The destinations we are talking about are real. The prehistoric paintings in the caves near San Jose del Guaviare are not made up with Photoshop. The travel experiences in these regions and the local people benefiting from a new sustainable tourism economy are not things you can fake through artificial intelligence.

What kind of projects are you handling at WhereNext?

I have been very involved with Destination Nature, which is almost an extension of what I was doing at ProColombia when we developed the Most Welcoming Place on Earth campaign.

Destination Nature encourages people to visit places that are still not very well known, even by Colombians, because they used to be conflict zones. We are inspiring Colombians and foreigners to fall in love with these places.

My work now is very different from selling potato chips—which is something that can be bad for someone’s health. The work we are doing here helps to promote the sustainable development of some parts of Colombia. We help people and tourism-related companies get their message out. We are encouraging a regenerative form of tourism that also has the potential to protect the biodiversity of these regions.

How are you trying to achieve that? How will you convince people to get out to often-overlooked places?

We are working on a campaign that will challenge people to get out there. The idea is to turn something negative, a societal fear of these places because of their unfortunate history, into an opportunity for positive communication.

So, is the challenge to break with negative stigmas?

Yes. For tourists to go there, it’s as simple as making the unknown more known, challenging people to visit the unknown, and doing so in a responsible way that benefits the local community and ecosystem as much, if not more, than the traveler.

How do you see the future of tourism in Colombia?

Tourism is growing in the country and will continue to do so. The recent peace deal between Colombia and the FARC guerilla group has made the country more appealing and helped to change the perception of international travelers. National travelers, who may have gone to Miami for a vacation a decade ago, are choosing to explore their own country in increasing numbers. Colombia has advantages, such as its mega-diverse natural history, geography, culture, and music, that help it stand out.

In some parts of Colombia, tourism can also become a sustainable development alternative so that people work with visitors instead of working with illegal logging or illegal crops.

What other kinds of campaigns are you leading?

We have been working with Swiss Contact, an international development agency that runs projects that help farmers who work with crops like coffee or cacao become more competitive. Their project is called “Making Colombia More Competitive.” Our client wants to communicate their achievements without sounding pretentious.

So, we developed a campaign called the “C + C Effect.” We are developing communications showing that cacao has displaced coca in a certain community, which is “the C + C effect.” More opportunities for women to work in a particular village are part of the “C+C effect.”

As I said before, this kind of work differs from selling products for mass consumption. We are promoting what people on the ground are doing and helping them to amplify their message. Internally, we call this “storydoing” rather than “storytelling.”

Big New York City and Washington, D.C.-based companies have traditionally dominated Advertising and Global Development. What kind of an impact are smaller businesses like WhereNext making?

With a company like WhereNext, there is greater specialization in a particular niche. And there is a more intimate knowledge of each client and their goals. Our creative studio, production house, and communications agency are integrated with our global development consultancy. That gives added value to our clients because our consultancy doesn’t need to subcontract out video production, graphic design, audio podcasts, or copywriting, for example. We avoid the “broken telephone effect” between multiple subcontractors and are more consistent and speedy across our client’s communication channels.

Another exciting thing about WhereNext is that we now export Colombian talent to projects in other countries worldwide. For example, our project with the FSC Indigenous Foundation in Panama is run by our Colombian project management group. This team brings an intimate regional perspective and street smarts to the project that some of our US or European-based competitors lack when working in the Americas.

I’m also working on a new WhereNext product called “A Sea of Opportunities,” a nautical tourism consulting package targeted at global development firms and government ministries in Latin America. Our Colombian-based consultants lead that program.

We’re noticing a greater demand for companies like ours. For example, you can see it in the increased number of contracts issued by global development funds where only small or regional businesses located where the work will occur are permitted to apply. These contracts are labeled “small business set-asides” or “localized bids.”

How do you get the most out of your team?

My team is split into two groups. We have a creative group with graphic designers, copywriters, videographers, and editors. And we have a project management group constantly communicating with our clients.

The project managers give our creative team information on the client's needs, and we start designing the content and creating messages.

But both teams are really content creators, and ideas can come from either group. This flat hierarchy and openness to ideation allow us to have solid communication and be good friends in and outside the office.

As WhereNext’s creative director, I don’t see myself as the guy who has to come up with all the ideas but as the one who can recruit and administer talent. If I come up with ideas, that’s great. But it's even more important to encourage a working environment where team members propose ideas and those ideas are respected and listened to.

Finally, what do you do when you’re not working for WhereNext?

Last year, I started designing micro-terrariums. It’s kind of taken on a life of its own, and I’m now making and selling them in small quantities.

Documenting Indian Bicycle Culture

My month-long road trip to document Indian bike culture went to hell on the twenty-first day. It was late April in Rajasthan—the beginning of the desert state’s summer swelter. At 3 PM, the temperature hit 118 degrees. I bagged my camera and retreated to the living room sofa of my guesthouse in Bundi town. Beneath the ceiling fan’s drubbing of scorched air, I broke out into a sweat that drenched my quick dry outfit and soaked into the sofa’s velvet cushions, staining them a darker shade of red. I was feeling faint and thirsty, but my throat was too dry to accept water. A bad case of heat exhaustion, I assumed.

A Hallucinogenic Milkshake

The guesthouse owner decided to call in a doctor.  

“Tell me everything you did today,” he asked while shining a flashlight into my eyes.  

As I mumbled through the day’s itinerary, two monkeys leaped through the living room window and vaulted onto my chest. The flesh had peeled away from their jaws, exposing bloody strings of connective tissue. Their gnarled hands clutched red-hot motorcycle exhaust pipes. The Doc remained calm. “And where did you buy the milkshake you drank this afternoon?” he probed. His flashlight erupted into a disco ball of nightmares. The monkey twins cackled and whooped. They began singeing the pipes against my flesh.  

My diagnosis was about to get ugly.

I dropped into Mumbai, India, a month earlier on assignment to photograph the Subcontinent’s first-ever UCI-sanctioned road race. Eddie Merckx was there in person to make the kickoff speech. “The Tour of Mumbai will eventually help uncover a genetic needle in this 1 billion population haystack. An Indian lad could be a future Tour de France champion,” he concluded. With those words, my attention waned from the results of the race itself (Saxo Bank-SunGard’s JJ Haedo placed first) and re-focused squarely on India’s cyclists—what does this genetic cycling haystack look like? I decided that a road trip was required to figure it out.

Back on the sofa in Bundi town, a boy dispatched to question the milkshake vendor returned with news. A few hours earlier, I was led to a back alley beverage stall by one of the season’s last hangers-on, a French neo-druid at the tail end of her spiritual tramp through Asia. In my mid-day thirst, I unknowingly gulped what the Doc described as,

“A lifetime stoner’s triple dose of hallucinogenic bhang lassi shake.”  

Follow the Good

“Visions,” he described, “they will last throughout the night into tomorrow. Let the bad go. Follow the good.”

With his parting words, “Follow the good,” I found safe passage through the darkness. I opened my laptop and started clicking through the nearly 20,000 images I’d made of Indians on two wheels—a sliver of the country’s estimated 200 million daily cyclists.

I reveled in the smile of the untouchable caste man I’d met in an anonymous brickyard. Between cycling to and from work, the bulk of his waking hours were spent shoveling cow shit into brick oven infernos.

A wandering mystic whose colorful robes floated like mirages above the tarmac in the late afternoon haze continued to bend my mental state between real and surreal. Traveling tchotchke salesmen, door-to-door pressure cooker mechanics, and milkmen. Mumbai’s dabbawallahs deliver 200,000 lunchboxes daily with an error rate of one in six million. Schoolboys dressed in carefully pressed outfits.

They all posed without objection next to their bicycles—the stigmatic emblem of the developing world’s poor. My mind wandered freely. It’s the same tool that citizens of the West use to proudly certify ourselves as cyclists. A tool that each and every one of my subjects told me they’d immediately trade for a motorcycle if they could afford one—if they had a choice.

In wealthier pockets of India, that choice is becoming reachable. Each month, hundreds of thousands of Indians are swapping their bicycles for a new, low-cost breed of carbon burner called the HeroHonda Splendor. It’s the world’s first million-unit-selling motorcycle.  

For every newbie who checks into the cycling trend in the West, thousands are lost in the East.  

And with those thoughts, the visions of monkey twins returned. This time, they were frying me with shiny exhaust pipes marked Splendor. I mused, “What if I didn’t have the choice to be a cyclist?” The monkey twins pressed and roared.  

“Follow the good,” I repeated out loud.  “Follow the good.”

*Originally published in PAVED Magazine.

Leer en español

Dozens of small islands lined with palm trees and powdered sand beaches rise from the sea, just a quick jaunt away from the historic city of Cartagena. It’s a sight that few tourists want to miss out on when they visit Colombia’s Caribbean jewel, known for its colonial-era architecture and magical sunsets.

Every morning, hundreds of boats of different shapes and sizes head out towards the islands—where they drop tourists off at beach clubs, take them to snorkeling spots, or offer day cruises that include meals, music, and open bars.

It's an activity known as nautical tourism, and while this is one of Cartagena’s most popular attractions, it's not a well-regulated sector, and its impact on the environment and the economy has been difficult to measure.

To better understand the city’s nautical tourism offerings, Cartagena’s tourism promotion agency, Corpoturismo, issued a tender in mid-2023 for a consulting firm to audit this promising but largely unregulated sector.

They said they were looking for a team that could identify the challenges faced by Cartagena’s nautical tourism sector, evaluate how the city’s main dock is functioning, and develop a proposal that will help Cartagena become a leading destination for sea lovers worldwide.

After being awarded the tender, WhereNext assigned a team of consultants led by Pablo Restrepo, an expert on sustainable tourism based in Bogotá, and Nicolás Kraliczek, a businessman who owns a sailing company that provides luxury trips around Cartagena to companies and small groups.

Researching Muelle La Bodeguita

“Corpoturismo is an entity with many responsibilities that include managing the main dock for tourists. That dock, known as Muelle La Bodeguita, has become an important city symbol.” Kraliczek said.

“First, we had to get accurate information on what is happening there and come up with a helpful, actionable proposal,” the businessman and experienced sailor explained.

To research the city’s nautical tourism scene, WhereNext interviewed more than 30 people associated with the industry, including boat captains, hotel owners, Coast Guard officers, and Bodeguita dock managers.

Kraliczek and Restrepo discovered that more than 2,400 boats have licenses in Cartagena that enable them to carry passengers. But only 180 boats have registered to use the Bodeguita dock, where they pay taxes to the city and fees to the national park that manages the nearby islands.

“Cartagena’s nautical tourism sector has been growing in a very disorderly way,” Restrepo said. “Our client needed to understand how that great degree of informality was affecting nautical tourism.”

Our team also found that the Bodeguita dock and its surrounding area are often crammed with small boats waiting to fill up with passengers before heading off for the islands.

Meanwhile, there is little public information on the prices for the different trips that leave the city, which means unscrupulous sales agents can overcharge tourists.

Other challenges identified were a lack of designated areas for marine sports like kayaking or paddleboarding, a lack of personnel to enforce parking times for boats at the dock, and a lack of comfortable spaces where tourists can wait while they board their boats.

“There is very little shade along the dock,” Kraliczek said. “And that can be a significant problem under Cartagena's tropical sun.”

Proposing Actionable Solutions

WhereNext produced a comprehensive report that details the challenges faced by the nautical tourism sector and provided solutions that can be implemented by Cartagena’s municipal government in the short and long term to increase the city’s maritime appeal.

We included actions that require minimal funding, like setting up a schedule for boats to use the dock or training local boat captains to improve the service they provide to customers—even by doing minor things like keeping down the music volume on their boat’s sound systems.

In the long term, our consulting team suggested that Cartagena could build a floating dock that can adjust better to sea tides and set up an agency to regulate nautical tourism companies and a website that provides reliable information on local nautical tourism products and the prices for each.

The team also mapped out how Cartagena could dispose of trash accumulating on the dock in a more efficient way and use software to track boats coming in and out of the tourist dock.

Restrepo said that the consulting work carried out by WhereNext in Cartagena could serve as a model for other municipal or regional entities to follow.

“Sometimes government entities are very focused on promoting and scaling up their markets,” he said. “But before doing that, you must get your house in order through implementing processes that allow for sustainable growth.”

Kraliczek said that while many of the issues encountered at the dock were not new to him or others working with nautical tourism, people in the sector were grateful to have these challenges recorded in a concise document that can be used as a point of reference by city officials.

“Many people who focus on tourism promotion might not be aware of these conditions because you have to be in the sea and working with tourists on a daily basis to notice them,” Kraliczek said. “Now we have a definitive report that provides proof of what is happening and recommendations that show how we can all work together to improve things.”

Navigating Future Opportunities

Kraliczek’s company, Maria del Puerto, has been operating in the city for a decade, organizing tailor-made trips for companies that include sailing races and even renting out boats to Hollywood studios that have filmed action movies in the historic city.

The businessman said that with adequate investments in infrastructure, Cartagena could also aim to attract large luxury yachts that make trips around the Caribbean on a regular basis.

“Most mega-yachts are only going as far west as Aruba,” he explained. “These people spend a lot of money. But they are not coming to Cartagena due to the lack of proper infrastructure.”

Gregg Bleakney, WhereNext’s CEO, said that the Cartagena nautical tourism project shows how the agency can put together teams with real-world business expertise to find solutions for organizations looking to promote sustainable tourism.

"Traveling is integral to our lifestyle beyond the workplace," he explained. "We are deeply committed not only to working on projects like this but also to engaging in the project's activities with a strong emphasis on environmental responsibility."

Learn more about our sustainable tourism consultancy HERE.

Un mar de oportunidades

Posicionando a Cartagena como un destino internacional de turismo náutico.

Una multitud de pequeñas islas bordeadas de palmeras con playas de arena fina se asoman desde el mar. Apenas un corto trayecto las separa de la histórica ciudad de Cartagena. Pocos turistas querrían perderse de esta vista cuando visitan la joya del Caribe colombiano, reconocida por su arquitectura colonial y sus mágicos atardeceres.

Cada mañana, cientos de barcos de diferentes formas y tamaños parten rumbo a las islas y dejan a los turistas en clubes de playa, los llevan a zonas de buceo o les ofrecen cruceros de un día que incluyen comidas, música y bares abiertos.

Esta actividad se conoce como turismo náutico. Si bien es una de las atracciones más populares de Cartagena, el sector no está regulado adecuadamente, y ha sido difícil medir su impacto económico y ambiental.

A fin de entender mejor la oferta de turismo náutico de la ciudad, la agencia de promoción turística de Cartagena, Corpoturismo, convocó una licitación a mediados del 2023 para que una empresa consultora auditara este sector que, si bien es prometedor, se encuentra poco regulado.

Corpoturismo estaba en busca de un equipo capaz de identificar los desafíos del sector de turismo náutico en Cartagena; evaluar el funcionamiento del muelle principal de la ciudad; y elaborar una propuesta para ayudar a Cartagena a convertirse en un destino líder para los amantes del mar a nivel mundial.

Tras ganar la licitación, WhereNext designó un equipo de consultores liderado por Pablo Restrepo, experto en turismo sostenible radicado en Bogotá, y Nicolás Kraliczek, un empresario cuya compañía de navegación ofrece viajes de lujo alrededor de Cartagena a empresas y grupos de personas.

Nuestra investigación sobre el Muelle de la Bodeguita

“Corpoturismo es una entidad con muchas responsabilidades que incluyen la administración del muelle principal para turistas. Ese muelle, conocido como La Bodeguita, se ha convertido en un símbolo importante de la ciudad”, dijo Kraliczek.

“Primero teníamos que obtener información precisa sobre lo que está sucediendo allí y presentar una propuesta útil y realizable”, explicó el empresario y experimentado navegante.

Para investigar la escena del turismo náutico de la ciudad, WhereNext entrevistó a más de 30 personas relacionadas con la industria, desde capitanes de embarcaciones y propietarios de hoteles hasta oficiales de la Guardia Costera y administradores del Muelle de la Bodeguita.

Kraliczek y Restrepo descubrieron que más de 2.400 embarcaciones en Cartagena cuentan con licencias que les permiten transportar pasajeros. Pero solo 180 se han registrado para utilizar el Muelle de la Bodeguita, donde pagan impuestos a la ciudad y tasas al parque nacional que administra las islas cercanas.

“El sector del turismo náutico en Cartagena ha venido creciendo de manera muy desordenada”, afirmó Restrepo. “Nuestro cliente necesitaba entender en qué medida ese alto grado de informalidad estaba afectando al turismo náutico”.

Nuestro equipo también descubrió que el Muelle de la Bodeguita y sus alrededores suelen estar atestados de pequeños barcos esperando a llenarse de pasajeros antes de partir a las islas.

Entretanto, hay poca información pública sobre los precios de los distintos viajes que salen de la ciudad, situación que algunos agentes de venta inescrupulosos aprovechan para cobrar de más a los turistas.

Otros desafíos identificados fueron la falta de zonas designadas para deportes acuáticos como kayak o paddleboard, la ausencia de personal encargado de hacer cumplir los horarios de estacionamiento de las embarcaciones en el muelle, y la escasez de espacios cómodos donde los turistas puedan esperar mientras abordan sus embarcaciones.

“Hay muy poca sombra a lo largo del muelle”, dijo Kraliczek. “Y eso puede ser un problema considerable bajo el sol tropical de Cartagena”.

Nuestra propuesta de soluciones realizables

WhereNext realizó un informe completo que detalla los desafíos que enfrenta el sector del turismo náutico, brindando soluciones que el gobierno municipal de Cartagena puede implementar a corto y largo plazo para incrementar el atractivo marítimo de la ciudad.

Incluimos acciones que requieren una financiación mínima, como definir un cronograma para los barcos que utilizan el muelle o capacitar a los capitanes locales para mejorar el servicio que brindan a los clientes: incluso con pequeñas acciones como mantener bajo el volumen de la música en los sistemas de sonido de sus barcos.

A largo plazo, nuestro equipo de consultoría sugirió que Cartagena podría construir un muelle flotante capaz de adaptarse mejor a las mareas; crear una agencia para regular a las empresas de turismo náutico; y diseñar un sitio web que brinde información confiable sobre los productos locales de turismo náutico, incluyendo sus precios.

El equipo también realizó un mapeo de la manera más eficiente en que Cartagena podría deshacerse de la basura acumulada en el muelle, y propuso el uso de software para rastrear los barcos que entran y salen del lugar.

Restrepo asegura que el trabajo de consultoría realizado por WhereNext en Cartagena podría servir como modelo a seguir para otras entidades municipales o regionales.

“A veces las entidades gubernamentales están muy enfocadas en promover y expandir sus mercados”, dijo. “Pero antes de hacer esto, debes poner tu casa en orden a través de la implementación de procesos que permitan un crecimiento sostenible”.

Kraliczek sostiene que, si bien muchos de los problemas hallados en el muelle no eran nuevos para él ni para otros que trabajan en el turismo náutico, la gente del sector agradeció que estos desafíos se registraran en un documento conciso que los funcionarios de la ciudad pueden usar como punto de referencia.

“Muchas personas que se enfocan en la promoción del turismo quizá no sean conscientes de estas condiciones, pues hay que estar en el mar y trabajar con los turistas a diario para notarlas”, dijo Kraliczek. “Ahora tenemos un informe definitivo que nos brinda evidencia de lo que está sucediendo, así como recomendaciones sobre cómo podemos trabajar todos juntos para mejorar las cosas”.

Navegando hacia las oportunidades futuras

María del Puerto –la empresa de Kraliczek– opera en la ciudad desde hace una década, organizando viajes a la medida para empresas que incluyen regatas de vela, e incluso alquilando embarcaciones a estudios de Hollywood que han rodado películas de acción en la ciudad histórica.

El empresario afirmó que, con las inversiones adecuadas en infraestructura, Cartagena también podría aspirar a atraer grandes yates de lujo que realizan viajes regulares por el Caribe.

“La mayoría de los megayates solo llegan al oeste hasta Aruba”, explicó. “Esta gente gasta mucho dinero. Pero no vienen a Cartagena por la falta de una infraestructura adecuada”.

Gregg Bleakney, CEO de WhereNext, dijo que el proyecto de turismo náutico de Cartagena muestra cómo la agencia puede conformar equipos con experiencia empresarial del mundo real para brindar soluciones a las organizaciones que buscan promover el turismo sostenible.

“Viajar es una parte integral de nuestro estilo de vida más allá de nuestro trabajo”, explicó. “Estamos profundamente comprometidos, no solo a trabajar en proyectos como este, sino también a participar en las actividades del proyecto con un énfasis marcado en la responsabilidad ambiental”.

WhereNext team members behind The Birders Show produced El Gran Chicó’s video series in English, Spanish, and sign language. Interpretive trail signs link to the videos through QR codes.

Links: El Gran Chicó Trail / Grupo Ecomunitario

Bogotá’s Virrey Park is full of life on weekends and has become one of the favorite places for locals to enjoy some fresh air.

Visit on a Saturday morning, and you’ll find cyclists gliding down bike paths, bodybuilders mastering their pull-ups at fitness stations, or families just relaxing under the generous shade of the tropical forest canopy.

The three-kilometer-long park in northern Bogotá is also home to hundreds of species of birds and plants. Recently, it was outfitted with a self-guided trail that includes 14 stops in the park and the surrounding Chicó neighborhood – where visitors can learn about the local wildlife and see what Colombia’s capital city is doing to become more sustainable.

The trail was designed by Grupo Ecomunitario, a nonprofit association led by a couple who moved into the Chicó neighborhood in 2013 and has shown a steely determination to make their community and city more environmentally friendly.

It runs along the entire length of the Virrey Park and extends into the nearby Chicó Museum and 93rd Street Park.

“We want people to be more informed and more conscious of environmental topics, and therefore more active when it comes to taking decisions that affect biodiversity and climate,” said Juan Caicedo, the ecologist and scientific coordinator of Grupo Ecomunitario.

His wife, Maria Stella Sáchica, is a lawyer who specializes in environmental regulations.

“If people learn about all the birds or plants they are sharing this space with, perhaps they will think twice before polluting,” she said. "Having information of what is here also puts us in a better position to demand from our authorities a transition to a more sustainable city."

The Gran Chicó trail is easy to follow.

At each stop along the route, visitors encounter colorful thematic signs with a map, a brief text, and a QR code that links to a web page with videos and relevant documents.

One sign discusses the importance of “Green Streets” and how roads can be designed with verdant corridors to help cities become more resilient against climate change.

Further along the route, another sign mentions that more than 120 bird species can be spotted in the area and provides a link to a checklist for birdwatchers.

There are also signs about the area's other fauna, such as bees, butterflies, and mammals – the Gran Chicó is home to possums, weasels, and at least five species of bats. One sign even links to a guide of plants that people can grow in their gardens to turn them into “oases” for bees and other pollinators.

Caicedo and Sáchica are proud of the self-guided trail – the first of its kind in Colombia’s capital. They believe it can inspire future generations of biologists and nature lovers not only in Bogotá but in other Colombian cities and rural areas.

“This can light up a spark in the minds of schoolchildren” Caicedo said. “And inspire them to innovate, keep studying, and push for sustainability.”

But the husband and wife team say that getting to this stage was not easy.

The couple first came up with the idea of designing a trail around 2014, when they began giving free tours of the Virrey Park and the Gran Chicó area to their neighbors and anyone else who wanted to join.

They had started the tours in the first few months of living there after noticing that the area was home to at least 60 bird species, including hummingbirds, owls, and Andean sparrows known for their lively songs, besides an impressive number of migratory species.

“We quickly had teachers who would come and ask if there was a way to bring their students,” Sáchica said. “Others asked if there was anyone providing tours on a regular basis because we could only do them when we had some spare time.”

Through Grupo Ecomunitario, Caicedo and Sáchica petitioned local government agencies to place signs on trees and other areas of the park because there was nothing in the area to highlight its outstanding biodiversity. They were rejected several times by officials indifferent to their proposals or resisted change.

However, an opportunity arose in 2021 when Bogotá’s city government accepted proposals for environmental projects through a scheme known as participatory budgeting.

Grupo Ecomunitario’s proposal to set up a self-guided nature trail in the Gran Chicó neighborhood was finally approved in December 2021, and they set out to find a partner to help them make a fun and informative trail.

They approached WhereNext and pitched the idea to CEO Gregg Bleakney.

“We just knew that we wanted something artsy that incorporated new technologies like QR codes so that we could link to videos and other information in English, Spanish, and sign language,” Caicedo said.

The request from Grupo Ecomunitario came while the agency was working on The Birders Show, a YouTube series with a mission to make the world of birding accessible to everyone.

Bleakney said he was quickly captivated by the idea of building a trail in the Chicó neighborhood that would help educate children, tourists, and locals about the area's biodiversity while encouraging people to connect with nature.

“We thought it very much aligned with our values,” he said.

Due to the project’s shoestring budget, WhereNext worked on the Gran Chicó trail for a reduced fee and deployed its team of graphic designers to make the art on the signs.

Meanwhile, some of the team members behind The Birders Show produced the video series linked to the signs’ QR codes, filming images of the area's biodiversity with drones and cinema-grade video cameras.

Scriptwriters from The Birders Show – which has already surpassed 200 episodes – also helped to make the text on the videos and the signs concise and appealing.

“At first, we had come up with scripts that were four minutes long,” Sáchica recalls. “But they helped us to turn them into one-minute videos, with shorter but more impactful messages that could stick with people.”

Sáchica and Caicedo believe these trails can be replicated in other areas of Bogotá – like the wetlands on the city’s western edge or the mountains that border to the east.

Bleakney of WhereNext said the Gran Chicó trail is not just providing information about a place or giving people something fun to do. Ultimately, it gets people interested in protecting nature.

“In 2018, we produced a campaign for Colombia to convey to the world that Colombia is the country with the most bird species, and that was a great marketing mechanism,” Bleakney said.

“But we quickly discovered that it is equally or more impactful to help Colombia develop more birders than any other country,” he said. “The bigger the army of nature lovers we can help empower, the more likely they will be to protect Colombia’s biodiversity. This project is a step forward in that process.”

WhereNext’s in-house communications agency will design and implement a strategy that highlights and positions the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs’ sustainable development initiatives focusing on inclusion, innovation, and competitiveness.

Client: Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) COLOMBIA + COMPETITIVA

Country: Colombia

Colombia + Competitiva (C+C) is a joint initiative of the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs and the Colombian Government, with Swisscontact — the Swiss Foundation for Technical Cooperation — acting as the local facilitator. The program promotes green and inclusive growth through public policy and structural reforms that facilitate a favorable business environment and improve competitiveness. The program also boosts the international exposure of cacao, coffee, and sustainable tourism and construction.

During the program's first phase (2017-2020), C+C contributed to 14 new public policy laws, reforms, resolutions, and decrees and invested USD 15M in 35 projects that positively impacted 314 companies.

WhereNext will implement a comprehensive communications strategy to publicize C+C milestones, achievements, and the positive impact of C+C’s work in Colombia. The full suite of services includes:

• Traditional and digital media diagnosis.

• PR and communications benchmarking.

• Creative briefs and brand strategy.

• Audience mapping, social network management, and content grids.

• Content writing and editing, newsletter management, and SEO strategy.

• Media relations, free press strategy, and press releases.

• Field video productions in the program’s beneficiary regions.

• Program conclusion events.

WhereNext has more than a decade of experience optimizing communications for purpose-driven organizations that make the world a better, fairer, and more sustainable place to live. The company’s multilingual graphic design, audiovisual production, marketing, communications, and project management experts work together as a multidisciplinary team, and its core management team has a wealth of experience delivering large-scale international development initiatives.

Read in Spanish HERE.

WhereNext se hace cargo de evaluar, diseñar e implementar una estrategia para posicionar las labores del programa en la promoción del desarrollo sostenible con un enfoque de inclusión, innovación y competitividad.

Cliente:  Secretaría de Estado para Asuntos Económicos Suiza (SECO) COLOMBIA + COMPETITIVA

Duración: 1 año

País: Colombia

C+C es una iniciativa conjunta de la Secretaría de Estado para Asuntos Económicos suiza (SECO) y el Gobierno de Colombia, cuyo facilitador local es la Fundación Suiza de Cooperación para el Desarrollo Técnico – SWISSCONTACT. El objetivo del programa es promover el crecimiento verde e inclusivo, fomentando un entorno empresarial propicio con la implementación de políticas públicas y reformas estructurales orientadas a la competitividad. De manera complementaria, el programa busca la visibilidad internacional y la competitividad del cacao, el café, el turismo sostenible y la construcción.

En su primera fase de implementación (2017-2020), C+C ha ejecutado 35 proyectos, ha invertido USD 15 millones, ha apoyado a 314 empresas, y ha contribuido a la promulgación de 14 leyes, reformas, resoluciones y decretos de políticas públicas.

Para comunicar efectivamente los hitos de C+C y dejar en las audiencias una huella duradera de aprecio y reconocimiento por su labor en el país, WhereNext trae a la mesa una estrategia integral de comunicaciones que va desde un diagnóstico comunicacional en medios tradicionales y digitales hasta la producción de eventos virtuales y presenciales para el cierre del programa. Entre el diagnóstico y el evento final, prestaremos una suite de servicios que incluyen:

• Benchmarking de comunicaciones y relaciones públicas.

• Diseño del brief creativo y arquetipo de la marca.

• Mapeo de audiencias, gestión de redes sociales (con la apertura de una nueva red) y parrilla de contenidos.

• Escritura de blogs, gestión de newsletters y estrategia de SEO.

• Relacionamiento con medios, estrategia de free press y comunicados de prensa.

• Elaboración de videos en campo (en las regiones donde opera el programa).

Estamos plenamente dotados para prestar estos servicios de alto nivel gracias a una serie de capacidades que hemos construido a lo largo de los años, entre las cuales podemos destacar: más de una década de experiencia elevando las comunicaciones de organizaciones con propósito: aquellas que hacen del mundo un lugar más digno, equitativo y sostenible; un equipo multidisciplinario de expertos bilingües en diseño gráfico, marketing, producción audiovisual, comunicaciones y gestión de proyectos; y una sólida infraestructura administrativa experimentada en la ejecución de grandes iniciativas internacionales de cooperación y desarrollo.

Lea este artículo en inglés aquí.

Sofia's passion for communication, social media, travel, culture, and food fuels her creativity, enabling her to craft captivating campaigns for our clients. She shares an unbreakable bond with her family and friends while also being an animal and film enthusiast.

Tell us about yourself.

I’m a 22-year-old book, animal, and film lover. I was born in a land of creativity, chaos, and language called Bogotá. People call me Sofía or Sofí. I like anything related to communications, social media, travel, culture, and food…that’s why I love learning languages, going to new places, and meeting people. My parents are also from the Capital, but my grandmothers are from Prado, Tolima, and La Tebaida, Quindio, both beautiful places. My dog was born in Apulo, Cundinamarca. I strive to learn something new every day and maybe also teach something every day.

Tell us about your most memorable travel experience.

Choosing one experience is really hard because each place I visit leaves something engraved in my heart, either the people, the food, the landscapes, etc. If I had to choose one, it would be the first trip I did alone with my mom. It was always with my whole family, but last year (2022), my mom and I went to New York; it was a very different experience because we visited a lot of places we couldn’t visit the first time we went. We enjoyed each and every day there, but what makes it super memorable is that my mom and I became even closer than we were. We talked about many things, and now our relationship is the best it has ever been.

Dead or alive, who would you like to join you on an adventure?

My mother. I love going on adventures with her, and I love spending time with her in all kinds of places. We also talk all the time, so I’m never bored.

What are your travel equipment essentials?

I always pack sunscreen, my camera to take pictures and videos that immortalize each moment, water, my caps to protect me from the sun, comfortable shoes and clothes, but also an elegant outfit for a night out. A book is essential for the times I’m resting or when I want to have some me time. My headphones and phone to listen to music.

When did you feel happiest?

Fortunately, I’ve had many very happy moments, but I would say I’m the happiest when I’m with my friends, laughing so hard that it’s hard to breathe.  

Who taught you your biggest life lesson, and what was it?

My dad taught me to be empathetic and kind. He said, “Treat others with kindness, compassion, and empathy because even the smallest act of kindness can have a significant impact on both the person you’re helping and you, and that’s what the world needs the most.”

You can teleport to any restaurant on Earth: where do you go, and what do you order?

I’m a big fan of Japanese food, so I’d like to teleport to a restaurant in Japan that sells delicious sushi, ramen, and takoyaki.

Tell us about the most adventurous food you’ve ever eaten.

I ate iguana in Curaçao. It was the strangest meat I’ve ever eaten and…I didn't like it!

Drink of choice?

Peppermint lemonade or passionfruit juice in water, no sugar.

Where do you feel most at home?

In my bedroom, cuddled up with my dog, watching movies.

WhereNext’s Creative Studio + Production House made Colombia's multiple award-winning 2023 international tourism campaign, Finding Encanto, to celebrate the spotlight shone on Colombia as a result of the Disney movie Encanto’s worldwide success.

Our Mission

Our mission was to document the experiences of six international travelers as they discover the essence and diversity of Colombia by following their individual passions.

The Deliverables

Our deliverables included a series of six ten-minute videos and trailers filmed in six Colombian ecoregions, produced in multiple languages for global markets.  

The Results

• Winner FITUR International Tourism Fair, “Best Audiovisual Campaign 2023.”

• Silver the 14th Cannes Corporate Media & TV Awards 2023.

• Terres Travel Festival Gold Award in the category “Tourism Destination Country.”

• Official selection of the Zagreb TourFilm Festival 2023.

Spanish writer, screenwriter and journalist

Mexican muralist and street artist

aka The Busy Twist, DJ and music producer

Montana-based adventure photographer

Athlete and founder of Latinos Run

The Six Protagonists of Finding Encanto

The Locations and the Protagonists

Wildlife Photography in the Eastern Plains

We follow Andy Austin, a freelance photographer from Montana, as he documents his adventures in the wildlife-rich Eastern Plains of Orinoquia and the Amazon rainforest.

Video: Finding Encanto in the Colombian Amazon-Orinoco Region

Gastronomy on the Pacific Coast

We follow Selassie Atadika, a French-Ghanaian chef, as she savors local delicacies in the tiny Pacific jungle village of San Cipriano and the coastal city of Buenaventura.  

Video: Finding Encanto in the Colombian Pacific Region

Spirituality and Mysticism in the Colombian Massif

We follow Spanish author Gabi Martinez on his search for the spirit of the jaguar among the ancient Indigenous cultures of southern Colombia.

Video: Finding Encanto in the Colombian Massif Region

Art in the Western Andes

We follow Adry del Rocio, a world-renowned Mexican muralist and street artist, as she immerses herself in Medellin's vibrant street art scene, makes traditional ceramics, and paints a mural in Medellin's Comuna 13 neighborhood.

Video: Finding Encanto in the Colombian Western Andes Region

Music in the Colombian Caribbean

We follow British DJ and music producer Oliver Williams, aka The Busy Twist, into the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta Mountains and on the Caribbean coast on a mission to immerse himself in the region's indigenous musical rhythms and culture. 

Video: Finding Encanto in the Colombian Caribbean Region

Sports in the Eastern Andes

We follow María Solis Belizaire, athlete, and founder of Latinos Run, as she challenges herself to adventure sports on the trails and rivers of Colombia’s eastern Andes.

Video: Finding Encanto in the Colombian Eastern Andes Region

Learn more about our Colombia production company, or contact us here.

Bogotá, 28 de septiembre de 2023

La serie documental ‘Finding Encanto’ ha sido galardonada con un Delfín en la decimocuarta edición de los Cannes Corporate Media & TV Awards.

Tras un proceso de selección que tuvo en cuenta a más de 900 producciones de 45 países, ‘Finding Encanto’ recibió un Delfín en la categoría Films de turismo - Países. La ceremonia de premiación se llevó a cabo el día de hoy en la ciudad de Cannes, Francia. 

Esta serie fue posible gracias al Ministerio de Comercio, Industria y Turismo, a ProColombia y al Havas Group Colombia. Nos sentimos muy honrados de haber sido la agencia seleccionada para producir esta serie de seis capítulos, que mostró la belleza de Colombia desde el punto de vista de seis extranjeros, quienes visitaron diversas regiones del país. 

El objetivo de la serie era mostrar la experiencia de viajeros internacionales muy disímiles, quienes descubrieron la esencia del país a través de sus propias pasiones, mientras que exploraban la diversidad natural y cultural de las regiones visitadas.

Cada viajero tuvo la oportunidad de vivir una experiencia turística alrededor de la biodiversidad, el arte, la música, el deporte, la gastronomía y la espiritualidad, todo esto inspirado en la película de Disney ‘Encanto’. 

Los episodios de ‘Finding Encanto’ llegaron a millones de hogares en América Latina, a través de la difusión en canales de televisión como Discovery Channel,  Warner Channel, TNT y Cinemax. El lanzamiento de ‘Finding Encanto’ se llevó a cabo en Times Square. La serie documental, producida en inglés y español, se presentó también en los Estados Unidos y en Europa. Esto tuvo un impacto significativo, ya que generamos 16 millones de impresiones durante su emisión en abril y mayo de este año, además de una proyección especial el 20 de Julio”.

El Delfín en Cannes se suma al Oro en los Terres Travel Festival Awards en la categoría País Destino Turístico. Además, la serie ha sido seleccionada para formar parte del cartel oficial del Tourfilm Festival 2023 de Zagreb. 

Nos llena de orgullo que nuestro trabajo contribuya a la demanda de turismo de naturaleza en Colombia, lo cual está alineado con la misión de WhereNext.

Ingresa aquí para ver la serie completa.

Equipo

Compañía productora

WhereNext

Directores

Gregg Bleakney
Julián Guerrero

Idea Original

Gregg Bleakney
Julián Guerrero Orozco
Cristina Arbeláez

Productores ejecutivos

Gregg Bleakney
Julián Guerrero Orozco
Sandra Eichmann Perret

Productora general

Natalia Pavía Camargo 

Productora de campo

Alejandra Samper

Director de video

Julián Manrique Trujillo

Videógrafos

Santiago Ospina
Alejandro Bernal
Andrés Velasco

Editor jefe

Mario Ruíz

Directora de arte

Yenssy González

Editores

Santiago Ospina

Felipe Nieto Moya

Fernando Moreno

Producción de audio

Daniel Murcia Adarraga

Supervisores creativos

ProColombia

Havas Group Colombia

See our work at the Paying for the Paris Agreement Resource Hub.

WhereNext’s creative studio + production house brings its storytelling prowess to collaborate with the World Resources Institute (WRI) in producing a series of educational videos that demystify the crucial public policies required to finance climate action.

Across the globe, governments increasingly recognize the urgency of addressing climate change as a shared global challenge. Consequently, most governments have made concrete climate commitments, demanding substantial investments for their realization. Yet, many key stakeholders remain unaware of the strategies available to secure essential funding for climate initiatives. To bridge this knowledge gap, WRI crafted a comprehensive report—titled “Paying for the Paris Agreement,”—outlining many available options for governments to meet their climate objectives, including avenues such as issuing green bonds, phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, and monitoring climate-related expenditures.

In support of this report, WhereNext created 16 videos that offer a clear, accessible, and impactful explanation of key climate financing mechanisms. We conducted 37 interviews with policy, legislative, and finance experts in the United States, Costa Rica, Chile, Peru, and Colombia. These expert insights seamlessly integrate with narration that clarifies key strategies, featuring original animations that enhance comprehension and visuals that showcase the Earth's stunning diversity, with an intent to inspire a greater commitment to a more sustainable future.

Our efforts encompassed the entire production process, from pre-production to post-production. We embarked on rigorous technical research with WRI's guidance and developed an original narrative to create compelling content for diverse audiences, including government officials, business leaders, civic organizations, and community members. Additionally, our bilingual team contributed to translating 16 public policy briefs and proofreading the Spanish version of the "Paying for the Paris Agreement" report.

WhereNext collaborates with director Eric Micotto to film an episode of car maker Infiniti’s 'The Makers' YouTube series in Mexico City.

WhereNext provided logistics and a field production team in support of a two-day video shoot that featured Japanese cars with the mesmerizing architecture, history, and culture of Mexico City. The result: a standout episode for a globally recognized YouTube series. Join us while filming in Mexico City.

The Mission and Challenge

WhereNext and creative partner Erick Micotto mission was to artfully portray Mexico City's traditional, ancestral, and modern elegance while highlighting the exotic features of a new line of cars. The challenge was to efficiently navigate the bustling streets of this vast expanse, with its 1,400 km2 and teeming population, and complete the shoot in a two-day period.

Scouting and Logistics

In short productions, time management is paramount. Our primary goal was to cover multiple locations seamlessly. Armed with a thorough understanding of peak traffic hours, distances, and the city's finest spots, WhereNext’s Mexico city-based producer, Daniela Beltrán, tackled the challenge head-on.

Our initial focus was to scout locations that perfectly accentuated the car's attributes. We sought wide, tree-lined streets with preferably more than three lanes, modern buildings, and urban design. We chose the ideal spot in Santa Fe, offering expansive open spaces for capturing captivating shots of the vehicle.

Field Production

On day one, we ventured to the city's historic center to make the most of the pre-sunset hours. Here, we aimed to capture the car amidst traditional colonial architecture, intertwining the story of our main character's admiration for the city.

On the second day, we headed south to seize the sunrise from a high-speed elevated route crossing the entire city. This vantage point showcased the majestic volcanoes and mountains in the distance. Returning to the city center, we captured additional shots of the car against multiple backdrops.

Our final scene brought us to the beautiful avenues of Polanco, where swaying palms and vibrant jacarandas created the perfect ambiance for the film.

The Result

Eric and the WhereNext team had plenty of time in fantastic locations to capture the best of Mexico City’s essence, showcasing the car's elegance and the rich tapestry of this remarkable destination.

The Story: “A Shot of Sake”

This branded content film is part of a YouTube series called The Makers. The series embarks on a worldwide quest to discover creators inspired by Japanese culture in different fields like art, jewelry, couture, and gastronomy.

Our film showcased the crafting of Mexican Sake, a departure from Mexico’s traditional tequila culture. This unexpected fusion was a natural progression for the founders of Nami Sake, stemming from their passion for Japanese culture and their desire to share it with the world. To craft the first Mexican sake, they flew to Japan, seeking the expertise of a sake master who could guide them in the art of making this traditional Japanese rice wine.

One of the Makers’ biggest challenges is educating people about what sake is and how it can be enjoyed beyond Japanese cuisine. By balancing tradition and innovation, Nami Sake created a fresh taste that is true to Japanese tradition but infused with a Mexican heart.

This episode of The Makers explores the birth of Nami Sake, the founders’ journey to Japan, the importance of quality ingredients, the educational challenges, breaking misconceptions, balancing tradition and innovation, the role of passion in the process, and the Mexican touch.

Learn more about WhereNext’s Mexico-based film production services HERE.

Tell us about yourself.

I define myself as a hardworking person with clear goals and the ability and strength to pursue them. I enjoy being surrounded by family, friends, and nature. My favorite spots are the countryside of Cordoba and Sucre, which is known as the savannah, the beaches of Coveñas, and the islands near San Bernardo del Viento. As for my professional life, I am a financial management specialist with over 12 years of experience in international organizations, both public and private companies in Colombia and the United States. I also worked on international projects in Latin America. Through my professional experience, I have learned the best from both worlds, public and private, and I have had the opportunity to work and learn from many talented people.

Tell us about your most memorable travel experience.

I have a passion for history, art, and architecture, and I love visiting religious sites where I can practice my faith. Europe has provided the most remarkable travel experiences for me. I hold fond memories from my journeys to Spain, Italy, and France. Additionally, there are still more places I aspire to visit, such as Fatima in Portugal and Međugorje in Bosnia and Herzegovina. On a different note, since my childhood, I've nurtured a dream of visiting Lebanon due to my roots. I've yearned to connect with the culture, cuisine, and people there. During my time in Lebanon, I consistently felt at home; the locals are incredibly warm, and I genuinely hope for the opportunity to visit it again.

Dead or alive, who would you like to join you on an adventure?

My husband and my family.

What are your travel equipment essentials?

Tennis shoes, t-shirts, a bottle of water, and sunglasses.

When did you feel happiest?

I have had several happy moments in my life, and what I have learned is to enjoy every second of my day. Consequently, it has helped me to feel the happiest and grateful for every moment and to focus on living my present.

Who taught you your biggest life lessons, and what are they?

Several people have taught me by example the simplest and most basic things in life, such as believing in myself, working for my dreams and goals, and being resilient along the way.

You can teleport to any restaurant on Earth: where do you go, and what do you order?

I love Lebanese cuisine, and I really enjoy visiting my parents in Monteria because they always have my favorite Lebanese dishes ready for me. In Lebanon, during a family trip I tried the best food in every single restaurant I entered. I remember this restaurant in front of Byblos’ marina with an amazing view, the best company ever (my husband and his family; we were 20 in total), and my favorite food!

Tell us about the most adventurous food you’ve ever eaten.

Definitely, Fat bottom ants and grasshoppers.

Drink of choice?

Colombian Coffee.

Where do you feel most at home?

I quickly feel at home wherever I go as long as I'm surrounded by love and a positive atmosphere. I believe one of my strengths is the ability to adapt readily to any situation or environment. I resided in the United States for four years, during which I made it my own while pursuing my master's degree at American University in Washington, D.C. Additionally, I've spent twelve years living in Bogota, and I consider it my home.