Unique Destination Creative: Reimagine Your Marketing Assets
August 10, 2021
Looking for a creative shot in the arm? Tired of your cookie-cutter creative assets? Madden is constantly working with our destination partners to create new ways to spark imagination. To build a lasting connection with travelers, DMOs must rethink their marketing assets and leverage unique destination creative to differentiate themselves from their competitors and make an impression on their target travelers.
Destinations have to deploy unique creative if they are going to stick out from the crowd. By leveraging a different creative strategy, coming up with out-of-the-box concepts, or using different design techniques, DMOs can level up their marketing campaigns with stunning creative.
Here are some examples of how Madden is helping our destination partners reimagine their marketing assets with unique destination creative.
Emphasize People Over Product
Too many destinations focus on themselves when developing creative assets. Ads should highlight people’s experiences at a destination rather than what is in the destination. By emphasizing inspiration over information, DMOs can spark travelers’ imaginations with their creative assets.
Visit Tampa Bay wanted to deploy a new campaign to compel people ages 20-30 to visit their community. Previous campaigns had focused on the destination’s attractions, beaches, and competitor differentiation. The new “Unlock Your Inner Pirate” campaign focused on how the target audience can live out the reasons why they choose to travel to Tampa Bay.
The campaign featured video assets tailored to resonate with 20-30-year-old adults. The videos featured 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. Compared to traditional DMO advertising with wide shots of the destination and narrative voice-over, these videos are a stark contrast and a great example of outside-the-box destination creative assets.
Look Outside the Industry for Inspiration
There’s no one way to develop destination creative assets. Despite years of DMOs sticking to the traditional creative formula, there are different ways of getting people interested in visiting a destination. DMOs should look for inspiration in different types of media their target audience enjoys and bring elements into their own creative assets.
Visit Independence created a Paranormal Path tour in its destination, showcasing three allegedly haunted locations. The campaign was developed to attract new target audiences that the DMO had not previously targeted. To promote the campaign, they created video assets that highlighted each paranormal building by emulating modern psychological horror movie trailers popular with young adults.
The eerie, cinematic videos paired spooky visuals from the properties with creepy voice-overs from the perspective of the ghosts that some believe haunt the locations. The captured imagery uses practical effects to cause movement or shadows, and modern horror movies inspired the music, camera work, and editing techniques.
While these videos marked a departure from previous Visit Independence creative assets, we ensured they stayed true to the overall brand by working with local historians to gain an understanding of each building’s history. This knowledge helped us craft videos authentic to each building’s feel and write voice-overs that were accurate to the period in which the ghost stories originated.
Leverage New Technologies
Some DMOs believe the channel used to deliver their ads limits creativity. Many think video is the only way to bring unique creative ideas to life and stick to traditional creative concepts for their display ads. However, advertising technology to make engaging display ads exists and should be leveraged by destinations looking to stand out.
Willamette Valley Visitors Association worked with Madden to create dynamic banner ads with MobileFuse. The banner ads drop down to a full-screen interactive ad that features both video and animation. The clickable map highlighted the different regions in Willamette Valley and gave descriptions and images of each.
Strategic Destination Creative Partner
More than being unique, creative assets must be effective. They must speak to your target audience’s interests and get them to imagine themselves in your destination. Madden ensures our partner’s creative assets do this by prioritizing data analysis and leveraging our full-service capabilities. Your creative assets will be more effective when you combine the creative expertise of our designers and copywriters with the domain expertise of our strategy, media, and MarTech teams.
