Poland Spring's 2019 'My Journey' film, created by Ogilvy and directed by Sean Thonson of Wondros, traces natural spring water through Maine's glacial aquifers
ARCHIVEPoland Spring Makes Maine's Ancient Waters the Star of My Journey
Poland Spring's "My Journey" is a 2019 film campaign created by Ogilvy, directed by Sean Thonson of Wondros, and released in the United States in April 2019, tracing the physical path of natural spring water through Maine's terrain, streams, rock beds, and approximately 10,000-year-old glacial aquifers to anchor the brand's "100% natural spring water" positioning in verifiable geography, according to Thecreativesroom.
The campaign centers on a single, elemental creative idea: the water itself is the protagonist, according to Adsoftheworld. Rather than featuring consumers, lifestyle scenarios, or celebrity endorsement, "My Journey" follows the movement of water as it passes through Maine's landscape — springs, rivers, sand, and ancient aquifers — arriving at the point of origin as a kind of destination. The campaign's objective is to substantiate Poland Spring's provenance claim at a moment when origin transparency in the non-alcoholic drinks category was becoming a meaningful consumer consideration across the United States.
Published as a television spot on March 19, 2019, according to iSpot, and logged as a professional campaign in April 2019 per the Ads of the World archive, "My Journey" operates as both a brand-equity piece and a credibility argument. In the United States, where the bottled-water category had grown intensely competitive, the film stakes Poland Spring's differentiation on geography rather than on product innovation or price. Maine waters, in this framing, are not merely a sourcing detail but the entire story. The campaign contains one media asset — a single film — a creative restraint that concentrates attention on craft and narrative rather than distributing the message across formats. Clapboard Score for this campaign is 63 out of 100, reflecting competent execution within a category that rewards authenticity but demands distinctiveness.
Poland Spring entered 2019 operating inside one of the most commercially active segments of the American beverage industry. The US packaged-water market generated approximately 17.1 billion dollars in retail sales for the 52 weeks ending May 19, 2019, across multi-outlet and convenience channels, according to Beverage Industry. Within that figure, the convenience and PET bottled-water segment reached approximately 12.44 billion dollars, up 5.3 percent year over year as of May 2019, also according to Beverage Industry. US bottled-water volume reached 14.4 billion gallons in 2019, up 3.6 percent from 2018, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation as reported by the Bottled Water Association.
That growth context matters because it explains the strategic pressure Poland Spring faced. In a category expanding rapidly across the United States, volume alone no longer differentiates a brand. Competitors including Evian, whose European Alpine source narrative is among the most well-established in global bottled water, and Fiji Water, which built its entire identity on a remote Pacific aquifer, had already demonstrated that geographic origin could carry premium positioning at scale. Poland Spring's challenge was to execute a comparable provenance argument using Maine's landscape and glacial aquifer system — a story rooted in North American geography rather than imported exoticism.
The "My Journey" campaign responds to that challenge by making the natural spring water's physical journey through Maine's terrain the sole creative content. The strategy sidesteps product feature claims in favour of experiential geography, inviting audiences in the United States to understand the source before they encounter the product. In a market where domestic non-sparkling water accounted for 13.7 billion gallons, or 95.2 percent of total bottled-water volume in 2019, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, that narrative specificity offered a route to shelf-level differentiation that pricing and packaging alone could not provide.
Sean Thonson directed "My Journey" for production company Wondros, working from creative developed by Ogilvy, according to Ogilvy Pl. The film's compositional logic follows water as a continuous physical subject — moving through springs, across rock, through sand, and into the deep geological time of approximately 10,000-year-old glacial aquifers beneath Maine's surface. That structural choice demands a particular kind of cinematography: slow, considered, materially specific, attentive to texture and light in environments that resist conventional product-film aesthetics.
The soundtrack reinforces the tonal register. "My Journey" uses "99" by British rock musician Barns Courtney, according to the campaign's archived credits. The track's anthemic quality gives the film a sense of scale proportionate to the geological subject matter, without imposing sentiment that might undercut the landscape's self-sufficiency as a visual argument. Sound and image work in the same direction: both ask the viewer to receive Maine's terrain as something worthy of sustained attention.
Wondros, as a production company, operates in the branded content and documentary-inflected commercial space, bringing a visual grammar associated with non-fiction storytelling to what is structurally a product origin film. The approach is consistent with a broader creative tendency in the non-alcoholic drinks category toward what might be called elemental filmmaking — imagery of water, soil, air, and light deployed to carry brand values without explanatory voiceover. In the case of Poland Spring's "My Journey", that approach means the Maine landscape itself functions as creative copy, with every frame of glacial water or Maine spring serving as evidence for the "100% natural spring water" claim rather than illustration of it. The result is a film whose credibility rests on the camera's relationship to actual physical places rather than on constructed scenarios.
ARCHIVENo verified performance data for "My Journey" is publicly available. No substantive trade press reviews from Campaign, Ad Age, Adweek, The Drum, or Contagious have been identified in connection with this campaign, and no verifiable social media reaction data has been located. The absence of documented metrics is not unusual for a television-first brand film of this type released in 2019, where tracking was often proprietary and not disclosed at a campaign level.
Structurally, "My Journey" demonstrates several characteristics associated with effective provenance-led brand communication. The single-asset discipline ensures the film carries the full weight of the brand argument without dilution across formats. The decision to make Maine's physical terrain the protagonist aligns creative execution directly with Poland Spring's core claim, removing the gap between what is shown and what is asserted. The use of Barns Courtney's "99" as a soundtrack, according to campaign credits, introduces emotional scale without overriding the visual specificity that gives the film its credibility as an origin document.
Where the campaign's structural logic is more constrained is in its resolution. The journey narrative, by its nature, positions the product as an endpoint rather than an active choice. For audiences in the United States already familiar with Poland Spring as a category incumbent, that confirmation of provenance may reinforce existing preference. For audiences less familiar with the brand's Maine waters heritage, the film provides geography but limited context for why that geography translates into product superiority. The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects this: a campaign that executes its creative premise with craft and restraint, while stopping short of the strategic distinctiveness that would separate it from the broader set of origin-led narratives in the non-alcoholic drinks category.
"My Journey" is a 2019 Poland Spring film created by Ogilvy and directed by Sean Thonson of Wondros. The film follows natural spring water through Maine's terrain, streams, and approximately 10,000-year-old glacial aquifers, building the brand's "100% natural spring water" positioning around geographic origin rather than lifestyle imagery.
Sean Thonson of production company Wondros directed "My Journey" for Poland Spring. Thonson brought a documentary-inflected visual approach to the film, using Maine's physical landscape — including springs, rivers, rock, and glacial aquifers — as the primary creative subject, with Ogilvy serving as the lead creative agency.
Poland Spring's "My Journey" uses "99" by British musician Barns Courtney as its soundtrack, according to the campaign's archived credits. The track's anthemic register gives the film emotional scale proportionate to its geological subject matter, complementing the landscape cinematography without overriding the visual specificity of Maine's terrain.
Poland Spring's "My Journey" aired as a television spot on March 19, 2019, according to iSpot, and was logged as a professional campaign in April 2019 per the Ads of the World archive. The campaign was created by Ogilvy and produced by Wondros for the United States market.
"My Journey" anchors Poland Spring's brand identity in the physical geography of Maine waters, using the glacial aquifer system and natural spring terrain as a credibility argument for its "100% natural spring water" claim. The approach positions origin transparency as the brand's primary differentiator within the competitive US non-alcoholic drinks category.
Poland Spring's "My Journey" received a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's craft-led execution and clear provenance narrative, while noting that the origin-journey structure, though competently realised, stops short of the strategic distinctiveness that separates category-defining work in the non-alcoholic drinks segment.
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