Visit Austin – Keeping Media Weird
Integrated Media
Challenge
THIRD EAR was tasked to develop a creative and media strategy to showcase the remarkable experiences Austin offers to travelers as a premier leisure and meetings destination. As Austin continues to grow and evolve, how can we differentiate the city as a unique destination and solidify its positioning as a hub of creativity and innovation as well as the Live Music Capital of the World®?
Action
THIRD EAR identified the leisure target as a “Curious Urban Traveler” that is digitally savvy and in search of novelty and new experiences. The campaign launched nationwide to the brand’s drive and fly markets via multiple touchpoints including retargeted HTML5 banners, rich media interactive map units, custom landing pages on online travel agents, influencer marketing, native, print and experiential efforts. We also used paid social units to connect with our traveler across their travel purchase journey from ideation all the way down to purchase. Depending on the media unit, KPI’s included conversions through site traffic (requesting a visitor guide, sign-up for eNewsletters and pending attribution date, hotel and flight bookings.) We also evaluated engagement within unique digital ad experiences.
One key element of the campaign was a custom experiential and digital partnership with Chefsfeed, which gave Visit Austin access to restaurants to create custom programs that were amplified with authentic culinary professionals for their niche foodie target audience. The program included a custom video series inviting chefs from our fly markets into Austin to experience some of the city’s biggest up and coming restaurants. The online experience was then brought to life to fans in Denver and LA with two event activations.
Results
The campaign delivered more than 128 million impressions across 25+ partners and drove strong performance across all key benchmarks. Across all digital partners, the creative had an overall CTR of 0.34%, exceeding the industry IAB standard of 0.10% for the travel & tourism category. Based on reporting from our travel attribution partner, Adara, the campaign generated an estimated post- impression hotel revenue of more than $3.1 million.
For the Chefsfeed partnership, the video series garnered over 2.51MM organic views with an average completion rate of 64% (which exceeds ChefsFeed’s benchmarks of 60%) and average video view times exceeding 2 minutes.
