CITY OF LA QUINTA

Situation

When Madden became the agency of record for the city of La Quinta, we began by identifying their key business objectives. While leisure travel marketing was important, the exercise showed that community engagement was their immediate priority following the pandemic’s effect on local businesses.

So, we established a plan to first address their local stakeholders and then expand our campaign to local drive markets once the city felt they had made progress on their priority initiative.

APPROACH

We began this campaign by first refreshing the city’s brand. We integrated a more vivid color palette to better embody the desert landscape and a “gem” tone (see what we did there). We also added a heart to the logo to emphasize the element of love, both in the campaign and in what the city wanted to show its residents. A love letter to La Quinta, from La Quinta.

In addition to the refreshed brand, we interviewed local leaders and entrepreneurs—producing videos featuring their businesses. These videos became La Quinta’s “Uncover the Gems” video series, highlighting the local business community and positive feelings residents had for the city’s culture. These videos live on La Quinta’s website and were promoted on their social media channels and YouTube.

The community engagement element of our local-focused campaign was capped off by an in-market activation. We brought the new La Quinta brand to life in signage, merchandise—including a new lifestyle brand line—and even a branded, retro van. This all was planned to coincide with the 41st anniversary of the city’s founding. Our public relations team amplified the reach of the activation, securing local media interviews for La Quinta’s tourism spokesperson and coordinating influencer visits to the event.

With the local campaign established, we expanded our targeting to immediate drive markets, primarily Los Angeles, San Diego, and Orange County, California, which our visitation data showed were the top origins markets. Our creative team leveraged the refresh brand to produce new creative assets and ad units to highlight the city’s leisure brand pillars, including outdoor lifestyle, health and wellness, culinary, arts and culture, and shopping. Our media experts, who had previously established foundational media tactics such as SEM during the early stages of our contract, branched out to additional digital channels to connect prospective travelers with the La Quinta story.

RESULTS