Boston Harbor Cruises and Rattle Advertising launched a four-film brand campaign in August 2017 positioning BHC as the definitive ambassador to Boston by way
ARCHIVEBoston Harbor Cruises Bets on the Harbor as Boston's Front Door
Boston Harbor Cruises launched a four-film brand campaign in August 2017, created by Rattle Advertising, that repositioned the company's portfolio of harbor experiences — including Whale Watch, Codzilla, and Harbor Excursions — under a single unifying identity, presenting BHC as an ambassador to the city of Boston by way of its harbor.
The campaign, titled "Whale Watch, Codzilla, Harbor Excursions, Brand," marked a deliberate evolution in how Boston Harbor Cruises communicated its purpose to audiences across the United States. Rather than marketing each product line in isolation, Rattle Advertising charted a course to elevate the overall brand, refine its messaging architecture, and create a coherent visual and tonal identity that could carry across four distinct film assets. The creative platform anchored on the campaign line "Awesome awaits," a phrase designed to capture the promise of discovery that connects thrill-seekers boarding Codzilla with families scanning the Atlantic for humpback whales.
In the United States, travel and leisure operators increasingly face pressure to differentiate on experience rather than price alone, and Boston Harbor Cruises used this campaign to claim a specific emotional territory: the harbor not merely as a departure point, but as the defining lens through which visitors and residents alike encounter the city of Boston. The campaign was published in August 2017 and comprised four film media assets, placing narrative filmmaking at the center of a brand strategy that had, over the preceding fourteen years, expanded from a single product assignment to a full-service relationship, as documented by Rattle Advertising on its agency website, rattleinc.com.
ARCHIVERattle Advertising had served as Boston Harbor Cruises' agency of record for fourteen years before this campaign was produced, according to rattleinc.com. That tenure gave the agency an unusually granular understanding of the client's competitive position in the Boston harbor excursions market, and the 2017 campaign reflected the accumulated intelligence of that relationship rather than a fresh-eyes rebrand.
The strategic rationale rested on a recognisable consumer insight: visitors to Boston often experience the city's waterfront as a transit zone rather than a destination in its own right. By repositioning Boston Harbor Cruises as an ambassador to Boston — not simply a fleet operator — Rattle Advertising sought to change the frame through which potential passengers evaluated the brand. The campaign line "Awesome awaits" functions as a narrative promise, inviting audiences to project themselves into experiences that range from the high-speed kinetics of Codzilla to the quieter wonder of open-ocean Whale Watch excursions.
In the United States, the broader cruise and harbor excursions sector was recording meaningful growth at the time of the campaign's release. The global cruise industry carried approximately 25.8 million passengers in 2017, up from 24.0 million in 2016, representing year-over-year growth of around 7.5 percent, according to data filed with and reported by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. North America supplied approximately half of all global cruise passengers in 2017, per the same source, underscoring the competitive intensity of the North American leisure travel market in which Boston Harbor Cruises operates. Competitors such as New England Aquarium Whale Watch and Spirit of Boston occupy adjacent market positions, the former competing directly on whale-watching itineraries and the latter on harbor dining and event cruises, making brand differentiation a commercial necessity rather than a discretionary creative exercise.
Film stood at the centre of the 2017 Boston Harbor Cruises campaign. Rattle Advertising produced four distinct film assets, each designed to carry the "Awesome awaits" platform while giving individual voice to Whale Watch, Codzilla, Harbor Excursions, and the broader brand story.
The creative approach prioritised experiential authenticity. Rather than constructing a generic travel-advertising visual language of sunlit families and slow-motion splashing, the campaign attempted to replicate the specific character of each Boston Harbor Cruises product. Codzilla's identity as a high-speed thrill boat demanded energy and velocity in its treatment, while Whale Watch required space, scale, and a sense of genuine encounter with the natural world. Harbor Excursions, by contrast, needed to communicate civic warmth — the idea that the harbor is a place of belonging as much as adventure. Holding those tonal registers within a single brand architecture was the central creative challenge.
As reported by rattleinc.com, Rattle's initial assignment for Boston Harbor Cruises had been to design the Codzilla thrill boat itself, following BHC's repurchase from Modern Continental. The 2017 campaign therefore represented a kind of full-circle moment: the agency that helped conceive one of the brand's signature products was now responsible for narrating the brand as a whole. That lineage informed the craft, lending the films an insider fluency with the subject matter that purely external production teams would have been unlikely to replicate. Production credits for the "Whale Watch, Codzilla, Harbor Excursions, Brand" campaign are not publicly documented beyond the agency attribution to Rattle Advertising.
Across the United States, travel and leisure brands were accelerating investment in short-form film content in 2017 as streaming platforms expanded audience appetite for video storytelling. Boston Harbor Cruises' decision to anchor its repositioning in film rather than static media aligned with that broader directional shift in the category.
Boston Harbor Cruises recorded consistent commercial growth during the period of Rattle Advertising's agency-of-record tenure. According to rattleinc.com, BHC's sales increased between fifteen and twenty percent annually across those fourteen years, a figure that contextualises the 2017 campaign as part of a sustained, commercially productive creative relationship rather than an isolated activation.
No campaign-specific performance metrics for the "Whale Watch, Codzilla, Harbor Excursions, Brand" campaign — including reach figures, conversion rates, or brand-tracking shifts — are publicly available. No verified awards for this campaign appear in the records of Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards, per Clapboard's editorial research. No trade-press reviews of the campaign have been located in Campaign, Ad Age, Adweek, The Drum, or Contagious.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates several qualities that correlate with effective brand repositioning work. The decision to unify product-level communications — Whale Watch, Codzilla, Harbor Excursions — under a single brand platform reduces audience fragmentation and builds cumulative brand memory more efficiently than siloed product advertising. The "Awesome awaits" line is directionally sound as a narrative anchor: it is experiential rather than functional, and it scales across the full product range without overclaiming on any single offering. A Boston Magazine profile published on May 7, 2017, described BHC's broader rebranding effort in positive terms, according to bostonmagazine.com, suggesting the campaign landed coherently within the brand's public narrative at the time of its release. Clapboard rates the campaign 58 out of 100, reflecting solid strategic intent and creative coherence offset by limited documented reach and the absence of independently verified performance data.
The campaign is a four-film brand initiative launched in August 2017 in the United States. Created by Rattle Advertising, it unified Boston Harbor Cruises' Whale Watch, Codzilla, and Harbor Excursions product lines under the platform line "Awesome awaits," positioning BHC as an ambassador to Boston through its harbor.
Film allowed each Boston Harbor Cruises product to carry a distinct experiential tone. Rattle Advertising produced four assets to reflect the specific character of Codzilla, Whale Watch, and Harbor Excursions while maintaining a coherent brand identity across all executions under the "Awesome awaits" narrative platform.
Rattle Advertising had served as Boston Harbor Cruises' agency of record for fourteen years before the 2017 campaign, according to rattleinc.com. The relationship began with the design of the Codzilla thrill boat and expanded to cover branding, digital marketing, and full media communications for the brand.
No verified awards for this campaign have been identified. Clapboard's editorial research found no award records at Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards for the "Whale Watch, Codzilla, Harbor Excursions, Brand" campaign.
Clapboard rates the Boston Harbor Cruises 2017 brand campaign 58 out of 100. The score reflects solid strategic intent in unifying product lines under one narrative platform, offset by limited publicly documented reach data and the absence of independently verified campaign performance metrics.
Boston Harbor Cruises competes with New England Aquarium Whale Watch on open-ocean wildlife excursions and with Spirit of Boston on harbor dining and event cruises. Both competitors occupy adjacent leisure travel positions in the United States, making brand differentiation a core strategic priority for Boston Harbor Cruises.
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