Converted a -25% decline into growth.
+40%
#2
growth destination for tourism - TIA
tourism campaign in North America - ESTO
#1
"Our inquiries are down -25%.
The advertising isn't working!
What do you plan to do about it?"
My first week on the job. My first assignment at the agency. My first meeting with the client.
This is definitely not what I expect to hear from the Director of Minnesota Tourism.
However, as a senior strategist who's always looking for a challenge, I live for this kind of stuff!
INSIGHTS ARE TRICKY THINGS​
Aesthetically, the agency's current ad campaign looks really good. And it focuses on a very simple observation that goes something like this:
In the United States, we take fewer vacation days than any other western industrialized nation. But we often waste those precious vacation days doing mundane and mandatory tasks: Catching up on medical appointments. Finishing overdue yard work. Cleaning out the rain gutters. And doing other things that are necessary, but not relaxing.
The "Vacation Days" ad campaign encourages audiences to take a vacation...as well as to stop using those valuable vacation days doing all that other stuff - a wonderful and relevant message.
The problem: At its heart, advertising is selling. That is, (A) narrowing in on a specific audience, (B) identifying their unique needs, and then (C) finding the sweet spot where the brand uniquely satisfies those needs.
But...Why Minnesota?
While the "Vacation Days" idea capitalizes on an interesting observation about the U.S. population in general, this 'insight' is not unique to Minnesota tourists...nor is it a distinctive sweet spot for Minnesota Tourism. Simply put, the advertising does nothing to actually explain WHY Minnesota is the ideal destination to satisfy the practical and emotional needs of the target audience. I mean, if it's just about getting them to take a vacation, then why shouldn't travelers just get away to the beaches of Florida, the mountains of Tennessee, or the entertainment of Chicago?
A small detail, yes...but an important one!
Of course, this only tells me what's wrong. To get to a truly persuasive place, we need to tap into something much deeper here.
GETTING SMARTER...FASTER
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There is simply no substitute for immersing ourselves in our client's business and our consumer's world. But you also have to know the right questions to ask.
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First, what "products" do our tourists consume? Our business is human behavior. So, before caring about who our visitors are and what they are thinking, I first need to understand what our tourists are doing. I pour through the past five (5) years of visitor data to better understand who travels to Minnesota, how frequently, and from where? Which modes of transportation do they use? Which "products" do they consume (fishing, hunting, outdoors, shopping, theatre, etc.)? From there, I look at the 5 Ps - Perceptions. Preferences. Planning. Priorities. And most importantly, any Patterns I could find.
​Next, who are we talking to, when, why, and how? Tourism marketing tends to segment just by feeder markets - basically demographics and geography. Instead, I want to use the above product consumption behavior to go deeper. Pairing the product consumption insights with data from Nielsen/MRI, Simmons, and Scarborough, I index Minnesota's feeder markets based on seasonal visits and activities, media consumption, planning cycles, etc. This allows us to identify seasonality, as well as to assign weights to optimize and prioritize these segments.​
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Finally, what need does Minnesota truly satisfy? As a complete newcomer to the state, I need to better understand what makes the Minnesota experience wholly unique. I mean, trees...lakes...fish... cabins? What upper Midwest destination doesn't have all that stuff? So, for several weeks I travel the state while engaging with travelers at Minnesota's many Welcome Centers. There, Minnesota travelers participate in activities like quick interviews, short surveys, and small sorting exercises. Next, we hold formal focus groups in Minnesota's main feeder markets - Chicago, Milwaukee, Fargo, and Minneapolis (a full 50% of Minnesota tourism is in-state/organic).
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So...what do we find?
REPLENISH. RECONNECT. REDISCOVER.
From the brief:
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"To these travelers, Minnesota is a unique experience that has been ingrained in them since childhood - packed full of the memories that they desperately want their own children to experience. It is a place where nature and humanity converge, allowing travelers to completely disconnect from the pressures of civilization. A place where they can REPLENISH all the things that daily life steals away. A place where they can RECONNECT to those around them. And most importantly, a place where they can REDISCOVER what's really important in their lives, what's been lost along the way...
...which often means, REDISCOVERING THEMSELVES."
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"A canoe is a lifeboat,” one woman had tells us during the research, explaining how this tiny watercraft pushes away the distractions of the world and forces families to talk to each other again.
"I'm a teacher," one man explains. "The kids who come back from Disney World, for example? None of the other kids are really interested or impressed by that. But the ones who come back from a Minnesota vacation? Swimming in lakes. Hikes full of discoveries. Catching walleye. The other kids can't get enough of those stories!"
Another woman talks of how she had taken a fateful paddling trip to the Boundary Waters with her daughters. "With pure silence, that big sky, and no distractions, I finally had the chance to reflect on my life and where it was headed. I wasn't happy."
Returning home, she asks her husband for a divorce.
Okay...so that last one may not be the best idea for an ad campaign, but it clearly shows the powerful spiritual effect that Minnesota can have on her guests.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER...
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Message and Media Optimization: The resulting communications work isn't groundbreaking simply because it achieves record results for the Minnesota Office of Tourism. Thanks to the collaborative and brilliant thinking of media savants Steve Thomas and Laurie Christen, along with the outstanding creative team of Kiumars "Q" Gourki and Eric Husband, ours is among the first examples of 'Targeted fragmentation' in the ad industry. That is, leveraging the audiences and cultures of different media channels to develop unique creative content for those media channels.
Campaign Optimization: In print (a stationary medium), the team creates a photo-centric campaign called 'Moments' - taken from the insights that (A) our traveling parents want their kids to experience the magic of Minnesota just as they did and (B) family members are the barometers to indicate when those magical moments took place. Meanwhile, the team leverages the active medium of television and online video advertising to showcase emotional short stories that connect the beauty of Minnesota to its ability to bond together the friends and families who experience it together.
Digital Optimization: Knowledge is power - especially the power to more precisely target and message audiences. Back in the primitive days of the early 2000s, we don't have today's DIY and user-friendly tools. What we do have was our digital leader Michael Opperman (one of the smartest people I've ever known). Leveraging information we had uncovered, Michael is able to identify and map planning cycles for different segments. Next, we schedule out-bound messaging based on those cycles - getting it down to the week, day, and even hour they would be most receptive and responsive. We even design automated follow-ups (the industry would eventually come to call this process 're-marketing') in order to maximize consumer response.
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Brand Activation and Follow-on Engagement: Thanks to our keen understanding of product consumption (an approach that seems relatively new and unusual for state tourism at the time), we deepen consumer response with brand engagement activities, such as feeder-market promotional activities (think truckloads of autumn-colored Minnesota leaves being dumped in Chicago's Grant Park), golf tourism programs, and "Trip on a Tankful" - a day-tripping program specifically designed for Minnesota's domestic tourism segment.
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Collaboration: Marketing is far more powerful with partners who share the load and enhance the experience. No one understands this better than our terrific account leader, Charlie Howe, who advocates for (and leads) tourism summits all over the state. This allows players from around Minnesota to share best practices and build key relationships. We even offer pro-bono tourism marketing consultation for key partners of Minnesota Tourism.
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Future Planning: We must always look for ways to make today's success play out for more success in the future. So, for the first time in Minnesota Tourism history, we embark on an ambitious database development program to capture, house, and leverage consumer information (feeder markets, planning timelines and materials needed, family size, travel channels, products consumed, etc.) so MOT can continue to improve its marketing efforts in future years.
PERFORMANCE...
In the end, we convert the Minnesota Office of Tourism from a -25% loss to a +40% gain in that first season (a +260% rebound). ESTO names it the #1 tourism campaign for North America and TIAA recognizes Minnesota as the #2 growth destination for U.S. tourism that same year.
