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 expected to hear from the Director of Minnesota Tourism.
However, as a senior strategist who's always looking for a challenge, I lived for this kind of stuff!
INSIGHTS ARE TRICKY THINGS​
Aesthetically, the agency's current ad campaign looked really good. And it focused on a very simple observation that went 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 encouraged 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.
While the "Vacation Days" idea capitalized on an interesting observation about the U.S. population in general, this 'insight' was not unique to Minnesota tourists...nor was it a distinctive sweet spot for Minnesota Tourism. Moreover, the advertising did nothing to actually explain WHY Minnesota was 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 simply make a getaway to the beaches of Florida, the mountains of Tennessee, or the entertainment of Chicago?
Why Minnesota?
A small detail, yes...but an important one!
Of course, this only told me what was wrong. To get to a truly persuasive place, we needed to tap into something much deeper here.
GETTING SMARTER...FASTER
​
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.
​
First, what "products" do our tourists consume? Our business is human behavior. So, before caring about who are visitors were and what they were thinking, I first needed to understand what our tourists were doing. I poured 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 looked 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 wanted to use the above product consumption behavior to go deeper. Pairing the product consumption insights with data from Nielsen/MRI, Simmons, and Scarborough, we indexed Minnesota's feeder markets based on seasonal visits and activities, media consumption, planning cycles, etc. This allowed us to identify seasonality, as well as to assign weights to optimize and prioritize these segments.​
​
Finally, what need does Minnesota truly satisfy? As a complete newcomer to the state, I needed to better understand what made 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 traveled the state while engaging with travelers at Minnesota's many Welcome Centers. There, Minnesota travelers participated in activities like quick interviews, short surveys, and small sorting exercises. Next, we held formal focus groups in Minnesota's main feeder markets - Chicago, Milwaukee, Fargo, and Minneapolis (a full 50% of Minnesota tourism is in-state/organic).
​
So...what did we find?
REPLENISH. RECONNECT. REDISCOVER.
From the brief:
​
"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."
​
"A canoe is a lifeboat,” one woman had told 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 told us. "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 talked 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 asked 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...
​
Message and Media Optimization: The resulting communications work wasn't groundbreaking simply because it achieved 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 was 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 created a photo-centric campaign called 'Moments' - taken from the insights that (A) our traveling parents wanted their kids to experience the magic of Minnesota just as they did and (B) family members were the barometers to indicate when those magical moments took place. Meanwhile, the team leveraged the active medium of television and online video advertising to showcase emotional short stories that connected both the beauty of Minnesota and 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 didn't have today's DIY and user-friendly tools. What we did have was our digital leader Michael Opperman (one of the smartest people I've ever known). Leveraging information we had uncovered, Michael was able to identify and map planning cycles for different segments. Next, we scheduled 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 designed automated follow-ups (the industry would eventually come to call this process 're-marketing') in order to maximize consumer response.
​​
Brand Activation and Follow-on Engagement: Thanks to our keen understanding of product consumption (an approach that seemed relatively new and unusual for state tourism at the time), we deepened 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.
​
Collaboration: Marketing is far more powerful with partners who share the load and enhance the experience. No one understood this better than our terrific account leader, Charlie Howe, who advocated for (and led) tourism summits all over the state. This allowed players from around Minnesota to share best practices and build key relationships. We even offered pro-bono tourism marketing consultation for key partners of Minnesota Tourism.
​
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 embarked 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 could continue to improve its marketing efforts in future years.
PERFORMANCE...
In the end, we converted the Minnesota Office of Tourism from a -25% loss to a +40% gain in that first season (a +260% rebound). ESTO would go on to name it the #1 tourism campaign for North America and TIAA would recognize Minnesota as the #2 growth destination for U.S. tourism that same year.
