Visit Tampa Bay

Situation

Visit Tampa Bay is a top destination offering a combination of urban and outdoor experiences, but wanted to expand their targeting beyond family travelers and attract more millennial visitors. Madden created the “Unlock Your Inner Pirate” campaign to highlight fun experiences young people can have in the destination.

Approach

We developed the “Unlock Your Inner Pirate” around key insights into our target audience. We identified key experiences millennials travel to do, including Instagrammable moments like hanging around the pool, drinking and eating, and exciting attractions. We knew to move the needle with advertisements, we needed to focus on these experiences rather than traits of the destination.

We produced videos of young people having fun and experiencing the things they aim to do when on vacation, such as drinking by the pool, exploring and taking selfies in the city, eating out, and doing photo-worthy activities like zip lining. Everything about the video was aligned with this target audience’s interests, down to the background music emulating their well-loved music genres.

We deployed these videos across digital and traditional channels, creating different cuts of the videos that highlighted different segments of the target audience. It was also vital to activate interest in Visit Tampa Bay’s key markets. We worked with local restaurants and bars in Boston, Philadelphia, D.C., Orlando, and Atlanta to hold brand takeover activations. Carefully vetted locations served the clientele the DMO was aiming to reach. In addition to getting these people to interact with the Visit Tampa Bay brand, we geofenced each location and delivered remarketing ads to people who attended the event.

The events also generated organic social media promotion with users attending the events using branded hashtags. This built proof through authentic endorsement of the brand and led to user generated content we could use to compel other travelers.

Results