ParticipACTION Bets on Bold Metaphor to Get Canada Moving in 2025
ParticipACTION's 2025 campaign 'Less Scrolling. More Strolling.' is a national brand platform launching across Canada in January 2025, created by Zulu Alpha Kilo, that uses a cinematic procession-and-void metaphor to challenge Canadians to identify and discard the sedentary habits crowding out physical activity in their daily lives.
The campaign's centrepiece is a launch film directed by Nick Roney and co-produced by Spy Films and ProdCo. The film opens on a procession of people dressed in athletic attire, each carrying an outsized symbol of modern inertia through a sweeping countryside landscape: one figure pushes a boulder constructed entirely of screens uphill, another moves forward entangled in gaming equipment, a third inches along wrapped in a cocoon of blankets and cushions. They converge at a large hole and, one by one, hurl their burdens in. Set to Wagner's 'Lohengrin', the sequence dramatises the cathartic release of letting go of the habits that prevent people from living actively. The hole functions as a metaphor for the pockets of free time that Canadians can actively create — and protect — in their days.
The campaign is the launch expression of ParticipACTION's broader brand platform, 'Let's Make Room to Move', which marks a strategic evolution for the not-for-profit organisation. Rather than simply communicating the well-documented benefits of physical activity, the platform addresses the structural and behavioural barriers that prevent Canadians from acting on what they already know. Zulu Alpha Kilo served as the creative agency, with Jenny Glover, Chief Creative Officer, leading the creative vision. Media partnership was handled by M&K Media, with a national rollout spanning Connected TV, linear broadcast, YouTube, Meta, and cinema. The campaign was scheduled to run through March 2025. Post-production was completed by Nimiopere, Alter Ego, and Boombox Sound. The campaign also activated a Make Room to Move Challenge that ran from January 13 to 31, 2025, through the Optimity app, giving Canadians a direct behavioural on-ramp from the advertising message into physical participation.
ParticipACTION identifies sedentary behaviour as the central obstacle to physical health across Canada. The strategic insight underpinning 'Less Scrolling. More Strolling.' is not that Canadians are ignorant of exercise's benefits — it is that the architecture of modern daily life, dominated by screens, streaming, and scrolling, actively crowds out the moments in which movement might otherwise occur. As Rebecca Jones, Senior Director of Marketing and Communications at ParticipACTION, stated in remarks published by Little Black Book: 'While most people understand the importance of being physically active, many find it difficult to integrate it into their daily lives.'
This insight positions the campaign in a distinct space within Canadian public health and fitness communications. Where campaigns from commercial fitness competitors such as GoodLife Fitness or Equinox typically sell aspiration and transformation through membership propositions, ParticipACTION operates as a not-for-profit with a mandate to shift population-level behaviour rather than drive individual subscriptions. That difference in purpose enables a more confrontational creative register — one that names the adversary (screens, passivity, inertia) explicitly and theatrically rather than simply selling a positive alternative. The strategic framing also aligns with a broader global recognition, documented by researchers and public health bodies including Canada Ca, that sedentary leisure time represents a growing population health concern across high-income countries. In Canada, the federal government's own physical activity guidelines, as outlined by canada.ca, recommend that adults accumulate at least one hundred and fifty minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per week — a benchmark that a significant portion of the Canadian population does not meet, according to participaction.com. The 2025 campaign, produced with what lbbonline.com described as a 'relatively modest budget', demonstrates that behavioural resonance can be achieved through creative ambition rather than media weight alone.
Nick Roney directed the launch film for 'Less Scrolling. More Strolling.', co-produced by Spy Films and ProdCo. The film's creative approach is rooted in scale and allegory rather than the lifestyle realism that dominates most fitness and wellness advertising. By dressing participants in athletic attire while burdening them with comic-grotesque symbols of sedentary culture — a screen-covered boulder, a tangle of gaming peripherals, a worm of cushions and blankets — the film achieves tonal duality: the imagery is absurdist and gently satirical while the emotional register, amplified by Wagner's 'Lohengrin', is genuinely cathartic and epic.
The choice of Wagner is not incidental. 'Lohengrin' carries connotations of procession, ceremony, and arrival, lending the act of throwing away one's distractions the weight of a genuine ritual rather than a disposable lifestyle moment. The countryside setting reinforces this: the film does not take place in a gym, a city, or a branded environment, but in an open, timeless landscape that suggests the act of making room to move is universal rather than demographic-specific. Post-production was handled by Nimiopere, with colour and finishing work completed by Alter Ego, a Toronto-based post-production house with an established reputation in the Canadian advertising market. Sound was handled by Boombox Sound. The campaign's key creative contributors at Zulu Alpha Kilo included George Ault and Jacob Gawrysiak on the creative team, with Grahm Chisholm involved in production. Jenny Glover, as Chief Creative Officer, articulated the campaign's emotional ambition in remarks published by lbbonline.com: 'We wanted to capture that moment of empowerment when people decide to make room for themselves — to get active, recharge, and prioritize their health.' The resulting film is among the more visually distinctive pieces of Canadian public health communication produced in 2025.
No independently verified third-party performance metrics for 'Less Scrolling. More Strolling.' are publicly available at the time of writing. The campaign launched in January 2025 and was scheduled to run through March 2025, as reported by lbbonline.com, leaving limited time for post-campaign measurement data to enter the public domain. The Make Room to Move Challenge, which ran from January 13 to 31, 2025, through the Optimity app, provided a direct behavioural activation layer, though participation figures have not been publicly disclosed.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates several characteristics associated with durable effectiveness in public behaviour change communications. The central metaphor — a hole into which sedentary habits are thrown — is singular, visually translatable across formats, and emotionally coherent from thirty-second cut-downs through to long-form digital placements. The multi-channel media plan, spanning Connected TV, linear broadcast, YouTube, Meta, and cinema, as reported by lbbonline.com, positions the message across both passive viewing contexts and high-intent digital environments, increasing the probability of reaching Canadians at moments of genuine receptivity. The accompanying behavioural challenge via the Optimity app closes the gap between awareness and action in a way that purely broadcast campaigns cannot. The campaign's use of a relatively modest budget, as noted by lbbonline.com, to produce an aesthetically ambitious national film reflects efficient deployment of creative resources. Clapboard rates 'Less Scrolling. More Strolling.' at 73 out of 100, recognising the campaign's strong creative distinction and strategic clarity while noting that measurable behavioural outcomes remain to be publicly confirmed.
'Less Scrolling. More Strolling.' is a 2025 Canadian public health campaign by ParticipACTION, created by Zulu Alpha Kilo. It uses a cinematic film directed by Nick Roney to challenge Canadians to discard screen-driven habits and reclaim time for physical activity, forming the launch expression of ParticipACTION's broader 'Let's Make Room to Move' brand platform.
Zulu Alpha Kilo created the campaign. The Toronto-based agency, led creatively by Chief Creative Officer Jenny Glover, has served as ParticipACTION's longstanding agency partner. M&K Media handled the national media plan, which spanned Connected TV, linear broadcast, YouTube, Meta, and cinema across Canada, according to lbbonline.com.
Nick Roney directed the launch film. It was co-produced by Spy Films and ProdCo, with post-production completed by Nimiopere, Alter Ego, and Boombox Sound. The film features a procession of people discarding symbols of sedentary life into a large hole, set to Wagner's 'Lohengrin', as reported by lbbonline.com.
The campaign launched in January 2025 across Canada. It ran nationally on Connected TV, linear broadcast, YouTube, Meta, and cinema through March 2025, according to lbbonline.com. A companion Make Room to Move Challenge ran from January 13 to 31, 2025, through the Optimity app, providing a direct behavioural activation for Canadians.
Clapboard rates 'Less Scrolling. More Strolling.' at 73 out of 100. The score reflects strong creative distinction and strategic clarity in addressing Canadian sedentary behaviour, while noting that independently verified public performance data for the campaign has not yet entered the public domain following its 2025 launch.
ParticipACTION operates as a not-for-profit with a population-level mandate, distinct from commercial competitors such as GoodLife Fitness. Rather than selling membership or transformation, 'Less Scrolling. More Strolling.' names sedentary habits as an explicit adversary, using theatrical metaphor to drive behavioural change rather than aspirational lifestyle imagery common in commercial fitness advertising.
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