“Here are some of the things we are doing as a destination marketing organization.” – Charles Harris, CMO, Visit Anaheim via LinkedIn
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Charles Harris, CMO, Visit Anaheim: ‘What Destinations Can Do Now’
Who’s in the News? People & Places
Time’s up! Who do you know who isn’t yet 30 and totally looks like a future destination expert, leader and rock star? Destinations International Foundation is closing applications for the next “30 Under 30” on Feb. 21, 2020. Click here.
NYC & Company has arranged another partnership deal, this time with Auckland Tourism and Air New Zealand.
According to AdWeek, “NYC & Company ads will run on bus backs and digital billboards in Auckland from April 6 through June 1, while the New Zealand ads will run on bus stop shelters through all five New York boroughs from May 4 through June 28. Timing is designed to enable prospective travelers to book Air New Zealand’s new service.” New Zealanders are among the top five international market spenders in NYC.
This latest joint marketing deal means that New York City has arrangements in six continents. In North America, NYC & Company works with Toronto; in South America with Buenos Aires; in Europe with Amsterdam, Madrid and Manchester; in Asia with Tokyo; and in Africa with Cape Town, South Africa. Many of these partnerships also promote airlines.
“If a one-day price above $200 causes too many people to balk, Disney is likely to know very soon,” reported the Los Angeles Times. The cost of some one-day passes as Disneyland has hit $200+ for the first time. Parking is $25 and that’s before you grab a meal for the kids.
In Canada, more than five million intercity commuters are affected as VIA Rail has shut down nearly all trains nationwide. More than 150 routes operating on CN Rail-owned tracks had been previously been canceled amid blockades protesting the Coastal GasLink pipeline. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau‘s government is backing natural gas exports in British Columbia along a 416-mile route that cuts through indigenous Canadian lands.
Launched in 2018, the United States Civil Rights Trail, a collection of 120 primarily Southern churches, courthouses, schools, museums and landmarks in where activists challenged segregation in the 1950s and 1960s to advance social justice, has added four new attractions. The additions are the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville and the SEEK Museum in Russellville, Kentucky as well as the Beale Street Historic District and WDIA radio station in Memphis, Tennessee. USCRT Marketing Alliance is made up of 14 state tourism departments, Destination DC, leaders from the National Park Service and historians.
Corpus Christi Convention & Visitors Bureau has hired Brett Oetting as the new president & CEO starting on March 16, 2020. Oetting had been president of Visit Topeka since April 2015 and also served for the past two years as executive vice president of the Greater Topeka Partnership. The hiring of Oetting comes after Paulette Kluge resigned in September.
Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau has appointed John Reyes as its new senior vice president and chief meetings, conventions and incentives sales officer. HVCB is contracted by Hawaii Tourism Authority to provide marketing management services for the MCI and leisure markets. Reyes brings more than 30 years’ industry experience, most recently as COO of Visit Sacramento and previously as chief sales officer and executive vice president in convention sales at San Francisco Travel Association.
Charles Harris has been promoted to the post of chief marketing officer & executive vice president of public affairs at Visit Anaheim. He also serves on the Visit California Marketing Advisory Committee and Brand Content Committee. Harris, who has been with Visit Anaheim since early 2014, was previously senior vice president of marketing.
Explore Minnesota has a new tourism website. It was rebuilt to be more mobile-friendly and offer more accessibility to features in response to findings in a digital marketing audit conducted in 2018. Features include UGC, plenty of foreign language content, more comprehensive listings and search capabilities, live chat trip planning assistance. The new site was developed and designed by Miles Partnership, State travel director John Edman said, “ExploreMinnesota.com attracted more than 5.4 million visits in 2019, and serves as many travelers’ first touchpoint with Minnesota.” Explore Minnesota’s last website rebuild was in 2010, with a redesign in 2014. Read more here.
Bravo, Bigfoot. The innovative campaign from Northern California’s Humboldt County Visitors Bureau that reached an audience of about 11 million and generated about $1 million of earned media walked away with the prize at the Visit California Travel Outlook Forum. “Bigfoot placement in the popular Face Swap Live app is brilliant,” said one of the judges. Read more about the creative campaign here and see other Poppy Award winners here. And…
…Steal this idea? State tourism officials present a California Dreamer Award to an individual who embodies the California spirit—”innovators, entrepreneurs and risk-takers who inspire others in their communities and around the world.” This year’s California Dreamer is Tony Hawk, a legendary skateboarder, entrepreneur and founder of the Tony Hawk Foundation, which has made gifts of nearly $8 million to hundreds of skate parks worldwide, providing a safe place for kids to skate.
Taisa Veras, Director of Social Media & Influencer Marketing at NYC & Company, was invited to speak on a panel on Art, Media & Culture at Harvard College Project for Asian and International Relations, a partnership between students and faculty of Harvard University. Her session was titled “Lights, Camera, Asians: YouTube Instagram Cultural Revolution.” Taisa is a member of the eTourism Summit Advisory Board.
Nancy Trejos, the former destinations and hotel USA Today travel writer who was hired by Skift as hospitality editor in October, has announced her move to Travel Weekly where she is now cruise editor.
In North Carolina, Crystal Coast Tourism Development Authority has selected SimpleView to carry out an update of the tourism authority’s website for the first time in six years. The region is an 85-mile stretch of coastline that extends from the Cape Lookout National Seashore to the New River.
Delta Air Lines sought attention with two big announcements: to invest $1 billion to become the world’s first carbon-neutral carrier and to hand out $1.6 billion in profit-sharing, the industry’s largest, to all 90,000 employees on Valentine’s Day.
The billion-dollar 10-year pledge will focus on improving jet efficiency and reducing fuel usage, as well as investing in carbon removal. Carbon dioxide emitted by airlines increased by 32% from 2013 to 2018, according to a study by the International Council on Clean Transportation. Instead, Delta got more media attention from CEO Ed Bastien‘s ambiguous remarks about seat reclining protocol.
Folks are dubious about Facebook‘s true motivation in reading Mark Zuckerberg‘s latest call for new rules (more guidance and regulation) as expressed in a Financial Times op-ed piece this week. Analysts are wondering aloud if, having been hit with a $5 billion fine from the FTC last year, does he just want to avoid the EU’s game-changing regulations and the possibility of deeper scrutiny and the push for a breakup of the business?
In San Francisco, about 50 protesters gathered outside Zuckerberg’s home to protest Facebook’s use of personal data and refusal to regulate misleading political advertisements, according to a local report.
The Latest Who, What & Where News…and Job Listings
People in Our Community
Destinations International announced the 2019 Hall of Fame Inductees and the Destination Organization Leadership Award recipient. The five leaders will be honored at the association’s Annual Convention on July 23-25, 2019 in St. Louis, MO.
Congratulations to Brad Dean, CEO of Discover Puerto Rico.
The 2019 Destinations International Hall of Fame Inductees are:
- Cole Carley, Former President & CEO of Fargo, Moorhead CVB (Retired)
- Kathleen (Kitty) Ratcliffe, President of Explore St. Louis
- Shelley Johnson, CDME, LCTP, Executive Director/CEO of Lake Charles/Southwest Louisiana CVB
- W. Bill Williams, Former VP of Diversity Sales at Choose Chicago (Retired)
Dr. Bill Siegel of Longwoods International, the travel and tourism research company, announced that he is stepping down as CEO of the company he created forty years ago. Replacing Bill as CEO is Amir Eylon, (at left) Longwoods president and partner. Amir joined Longwoods in 2015 from his previous role as VP-Partner Engagement at Brand USA, prior to which he was director of Ohio Office of Tourism and EVP of the Ohio Hotel & Lodging Association, among other roles.
Read comments from Amir Eylon in this week’s coverage, “Visit Florida Gets a Lease on Life and What’s With Tourism Marketing Dollars?“
In related people news, Anna Blount, who was formerly director of market research at MMGY Global, joined Longwoods International two months ago as the company’s first Director of Research Services at its U.S. headquarters in Columbus, Ohio.
Brand USA has announced the appointment of Colin Skerritt as its regional director based in Toronto, Canada for the promotion of America as a premier travel destination for Canadians. Colin brings deep knowledge of the market via his previous roles as Canada’s head of Antigua & Barbuda Tourism Authority and senior sales and marketing with Air Canada and Virgin Atlantic Airways.
According to the National Tourism and Travel Office, U.S. Dept. of Commerce, preliminary numbers for 2018 show a 5% uplift in Canadian visitors over the year previous to 21.2 million in 2018 and a forecast for continuing growth through 2023, bringing annual arrivals to an expected 24.6 million.
Sherry L. Rupert is the new executive director for the American Indian Alaska Native Tourism Association (AIANTA), charged with extending the nationwide voice of tribal tourism. Rupert, an American Indian of Paiute and Washoe heritage, served as executive director of the State of Nevada Indian Commission. She has also served on the U.S. Department of Commerce Travel and Tourism Advisory Board.
Rupert replaces Camille Ferguson, who returns to her home community of Sitka, Alaska, where she will focus on growing tourism and economic development opportunities for the Sitka Tribe of Alaska as the Economic Development Director.
Laura Beth Strickland has been promoted to executive director of the Vicksburg Convention and Visitors Bureau in Mississippi, effective July 1. Strickland, a 10-year veteran of the bureau, replaces Bill Seratt, retiring after 12 years’ service. Stickland serves on the Southeast Tourism Society Congressional Summit Mississippi and the Mississippi Tourism Association Board of Directors.
Kenny Mitchell is appointed the first-ever chief marketing officer for Snap Inc., snapped up from the food industry. He was previously served as VP of marketing at McDonald’s and prior to that, he was head of consumer engagement at Gatorade.
Mitchell’s appointment follows a string of recent hires following a number of departures. Last fall, the company brought chief business officer Jeremi Gorman on board from Amazon, where she served as head of advertising sales. Other recent hires include chief strategy officer Jared Grusd, previously CEO of Huffington Post, and chief communications officer Julie Henderson, from 21st Century Fox.
Oddball Items and Interesting Stuff
Not fake news…just a giant fake potato in a 400-acre field in Idaho that you can rent for $200 a night (plus tax) on Airbnb. The plaster potato was created by the Idaho Potato Commission as a touring promotion. Following six years on the back of a truck, the commission was at a loss of what to do with it. So, an Airbnb superhost made it into a hotel. Get the inside story here.
Cleverness in a can: BEHR Paint, exclusive brand of The Home Depot, is hiring one lucky, colorful individual to source ideas and create names for new paint hues based on sights in destinations across North America. Travel all summer and earn $10K on top. Looks like Lake Louise and Charleston, SC are already signed up on this itinerary of inspiration. Read more about Color Explorer here.
Iceberg finder rocks: Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism are flaunting what they’ve got…dozens of icebergs floating offshore in Iceberg Alley. That chilling fact points to IcebergFinder.com, the world’s best real-time satellite tracker channel to place these glacial giants on a map. Destination Canada is a partner for UGC, as you’d imagine, and local tour operators promote sightseeing itineraries by boat, kayak, and from the land. Aimed at enticing visitors to the destination to see icebergs float slowly by, the site reminds us that “some pieces just don’t fit inside the Guggenheim [museum].” An astonishing award-winning campaign for an extraordinary natural phenomenon. More here.
Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau bought ads on 250,000 public transit MetroCards in New York City. Six of them will be drawn at random to receive a prize Hawaii vacation for two: a six-night trip, airfare, accommodation, rental car and $1,500 in spending. The trick? Each winner will need to visit Hawaii.NYC to register.
Driverless websites: Hertz, the car rental giant, can’t get the keys to its own website. The company is suing for $32 million over a contracted website and mobile app re-design that lost its way.
Accenture, the global management consulting firm, is on the other side of the legal nightmare. Read more here.
For Lease in Venice Beach: BuzzFeed, the darling of new digital media, has laid off 220 staff, equal to 15% of its workforce. Across the USA, Brooklyn-based Vice Media has shed 10% or 250 employees. Gannett, which owns 100 titles including USA Today, laid off 400 people. The McClatchy Company, owner of the Miami Herald and Kansas City Star, among other papers, fired 450 employees. Verizon (AOL, Yahoo, HuffPost), Condé Nast, Dallas Morning News, Cleveland Plain Dealer and New York Magazine suffered more of the same. The estimate is 2,400 media/reporting jobs wiped out since the start of 2019…and counting. Read more here.
Overtourism on Amsterdam’s canals: Just sayin‘…
It’s all Greek to me: Does Facebook think it owns the word ‘face’? In Athens, Greece, a new digital app offering personal tours of the world’s ancient monuments in 14 languages won a business startup incubator award from the local chamber of commerce. The founders registered for a trademark under the name Face Traveller to emphasize the one-to-one aspect of their product and within days were hit with a 50-page objection from Facebook in Greece. “Facebook is challenging a company that makes 70,000 euros a year when it probably makes 70,000 dollars a minute,” said one of the Face Traveller partners. Read more here.
(Mostly) New Job Searches
Instagram is looking for a digital marketing manager with 10+ years experience in social media for its HQ in Menlo Park, Calif.
Airbnb wants a lead content strategist, a skilled writer with UX background for product marketing and growth; San Francisco HQ.
Expedia Group is looking for a brand partnerships manager with a background in both media and tourism/destination marketing for its Bellevue, Wash. HQ.
Virtuoso, the leading international travel agency network specializing in luxury and experiential travel, requires an experienced associate editor in Seattle HQ.
Visit Vancouver is searching for their next president & CEO.
The Tourism Division of the Georgia Department of Economic Development is seeking a director of global market development.
Visit Anaheim team members securing promotions means there are new open job listings: manager of tourism development communications; specialist convention marketing manager; and business intelligence director.
Destination British Columbia is hiring for three roles: two in analytics and one in content marketing.
Visit Lake Geneva, Wisc. requires a director of marketing, communications, and development.
Chicago Loop Alliance requires a marketing director; closing date May 3 for applications.
Los Angeles Tourism & Convention Board seeks a manager, international tourism with prior experience, Korean and/or Spanish skills a plus. They’re also looking for a manager of social media with 3-5 years experience.
Peoria Area Convention & Visitors Bureau is searching for both a president/CEO and a chief marketing officer.
Bloomington Convention & Visitors Bureau (MN) requires a social media and digital marketing coordinator.
Visit Casper, Wyoming, seeks a content marketing coordinator.
Fairfield Conference and Visitors Bureau in Northern Calif. requires a director of marketing.
Willamette Valley Visitors Association seeks an executive director in Salem, Oregon.
Visit Bellevue, Wash. is looking for a partnership manager with at least three years of related experience.
Discover the Palm Beaches requires an advertising and promotions manager.
Pompano Beach wants a marketing director.
The City of New Bedford, Mass. requires a tourism marketing manager.
MMGY Global needs a media supervisor with 4-7 years experience for its Kansas City office.
Miles Partnership in Denver requires an experienced media coordinator.
Hylink Digital Solutions, a large independently-owned ad and media agency in China needs an experienced account executive for travel and tourism sector in the LA office.
Hilton wants a senior director of social media marketing in its McLean, Virginia HQ, 10 years experience required.
Universal Orlando requires a manager, marketing analytics and client engagement at mid-senior level.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art seeks a manager of visitor experience in NYC.
Stratford Festival, North America’s largest classical repertory theatre company, requires a Senior Director of Marketing & Audience Development in Ontario, Canada.
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People on the Move, New Jobs, Updates, and a Bit of Green Slime
National Travel and Tourism Week is May 5-11, 2019. Access a digital tool kit from U.S. Travel Association with a sample press release, logo, stats, tweets, daily themes, talking points, blog posts, proclamation, and more. Click here.
A new candidate search for Associate VP – Integrated Marketing for Discover the Palm Beaches, Florida is being conducted by SearchWide Global.
Visit Anaheim is seeking a business intelligence officer at director level.
In NYC, Macy’s is hiring a manager – tourism marketing to help drive international and domestic visitor traffic.
Keiko Matsudo Orrall has been named executive director of the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism. Prior to her appointment, Orrall served in the Massachusetts Legislature for four terms. She succeeds Francois-Laurent Nivaud, a management consultant and former hotelier who held the post for three years.
Maryland Department of Commerce Secretary Kelly M. Schulz has named Tom Riford as assistant secretary responsible for managing the Division of Tourism, Film, and the Arts and the Department of Marketing and Communications. Riford was most recently the executive director of the Thomas Kennedy Center Inc. Riford served for more than a decade as the president and CEO of the Hagerstown-Washington County Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Cathy Tull, chief marketing officer for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, resigned abruptly after 14 years’ service, reported the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The article states that Tull was the target of investigations by the newspaper and the local police department looking into allegations of misspending. More reporting is found here. Note: “The Review-Journal is owned by the family of Las Vegas Sands Corp. Chairman and CEO Sheldon Adelson. Las Vegas Sands Corp. operates the Sands Expo & Convention Center, which competes with the LVCVA-operated Las Vegas Convention Center,” the newspaper by way of disclosure.
Mike Waterman has not had his contract renewed as president and CEO of Visit Houston. He held the post since May 2015 and also served as chief sales and marketing officer for Houston First, which runs the George R. Brown Convention Center, a hotel, multiple major downtown cultural facilities, plazas, and more. Visit Houston (formerly Houston CVB) was structurally aligned within Houston First several years ago.
Brenda Bazan, Houston First’s inaugural CFO when the corporation was founded in 2011, was named president and CEO in February 2018 after Dawn Ullrich was abruptly dismissed. She will immediately assume oversight responsibilities for the management of the sales, tourism and marketing divisions.
“Maryland, America in Miniature,” evolved into “We’re Open for Business,” which is being leveraged into “Maryland — Open For It.” (Hmm. Google it up and you’ll get the Maryland Open Golf Championship.) ‘Open For It’ was developed over the past 18 months by the agency of record, Columbia, Maryland-based Marriner Marketing Communications.
Targeted markets include the New York metro area, Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. The campaign also includes print advertising in national and regional magazines, as well as companion radio, digital and social media campaigns. Multiple versions of ‘Maryland – Open for It’ began running this week on television and will continue throughout the spring. Here’s the 30-second video.
Quadricentennial alert! America’s oldest seaport, Gloucester, Massachusetts, is one of the nation’s first destinations to prepare for a 400th anniversary. Depicting a fisherman steering his boat over powerful waves, the log designed by a 13th generation local resident has been selected ahead of Gloucester400 in 2023.
The Florida Association of Destination Marketing Organizations delivered “green slime” (gooey, green glow-in-the-dark putty) last week to Florida’s legislators with a clear message about the importance of reauthorizing and fully funding Visit Florida, reported Sunshine State News. Visit Florida will dissolve in October if lawmakers don’t approve funding. Watch more here from ABC TV-WTXL, Tallahassee.
Madden Media, destination marketing services provider based in Tucson, announced an agreement with Burghardt+Doré, full-service creative agency focused on travel and tourism, to join forces.
This partnership started six years ago when Madden Media, a Google Premier Partner, began providing digital marketing services to clients of Burghardt-Doré. Principals Jeff Burghardt and Nicole Doré (pictured here), and others from the Carmel, California office will join the 100-strong Madden Media team.
Brand USA announced a new partnership with Marriott International and Marriott Bonvoy, its loyalty program, to boost the “United Stories” campaign (see The Travel Vertical, 1/22/2019). So far in 2019, the United Stories mobile content lab has traveled to Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Vermont. “At each destination, United Stories content creators spotlight first-person perspectives of American culture via locals, influencers, and travelers,” reports Travel Pulse. Read more here.
More news from Marriott International: The world’s tallest modular hotel is on track to be stacked in late fall in New York City, made from prefabricated and pre-furnished guest rooms. ” Its 168 guest rooms will be assembled in a factory in Poland, shipped overseas and trucked into New York in the middle of the night when the city streets can accommodate the oversized loads,” reports Bloomberg News. The 360-foot-tall tower will take only 90 days to erect, a milestone in Marriott’s initiative encouraging hotel developers to embrace modular for new construction projects. The AC Hotel New York NoMad will have a modular rooftop bar as well. Read more here.
On the 50th anniversary of the June 1969 Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village, Orbitz lists the top 10 US cities travelers are booking for Pride Month. Based on data pulled from their microsite tailored to LGBT travel and a survey, Provincetown, Massachusetts tops the list. Get the details here.
Like. Celebrate. Love. Insightful. Curious. According to Search Engine Journal, LinkedIn is rolling out four new emotional reactions to sit alongside the current ‘like’ button for posts. Read more here.
Meantime, Mashable reports that Instagram might start hiding the number of likes on a post. So, whatever…more here.
Snapping up talent. Per LinkedIn observers, Chinese social media company TikTok has already successfully recruited 14 key hires from rival Snap. One of the most downloaded apps of 2018, now with 500 million-plus users, the LA-based company is making a push into the US market. Is TikTok a lot of teens doing Disney lip syncs or is there a lot more appeal and opportunity behind its short-form mobile video technology?
The United States Department of Homeland Security says U.S. Customs and Border Protection is working toward implementation of biometric exit technology to cover more than 97% of departing commercial air travelers within the next four years, reports Phocuswire. Read more here.
For the Curious: 11 Things for DMOs to Know About This Week
Uber and Lyft drivers wrapped cars with Visit Tampa Bay advertising to promote the destination in target markets up north: NYC, Chicago, and Boston. Earlier this year, Visit Tampa Bay launched a campaign in London where it wrapped taxis with similar imagery. It was part of a $250,000 campaign that included a network of digital billboards promoting the area in Britain. Carvertise, a marketing startup in Delaware, says it has a network of about 425,000 drivers who are paid to wrap their cars. Read more here.
Visit Florida has launched a travel accessibility site to help promote the Sunshine State as a top destination for special needs travelers. Visit the site here.
“Who broke Facebook?” Twitter users are asking. If you’re counting the outages that affect your data reporting, we’re now up to three major blackouts since January according to downdetector.com, which tracks them weekly. Read more from Bloomberg News here.
News (unannounced) gleaned from a Silicon Valley tech stealth: Facebook engineers are experimenting with putting Messenger back into its main app. This could be part of “an ambitious project to more tightly integrate its messaging services—Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram direct messages—with encrypted messaging,” reports Business Insider.
“Follow, unfollow, follow, unfollow…who does that? Spammers,” says Twitter Safety. That’s why Twitter has just announced a big downward adjustment in the number of accounts a user can follow each day, dropping it from 1,000 to 400.
A new study by Oxford Economics shows that marketing initiatives by Brand USA drove record international visitor spending and economic impact in fiscal year 2018. The resulting FY2018 marketing ROI was 32:1, meaning that every $1 Brand USA spent on marketing generated $32 in spend by international visitors. Continue reading here.
Los Angeles Tourism teamed up with augmented reality startup Kabaq to share gorgeous sunsets with Snapchat users in eight key markets: New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Boston, Atlanta, Dallas, Washington, D.C., and Denver. “Users can don a pair of sunglasses that projects a real streaming sunset from Los Angeles. When they use the swap camera feature, the fully immersive Los Angeles sunset will be projected over their current skylines,” reports AdWeek. Read more here.
This is also how not to spend $300K on three words. “This is Fremantle” is the tourism tagline developed by a city outside Perth, Australia after a six-month-long creative consultation. (Okay, to be fair, they also got six short videos out of it.) The previous slogan was Fremantle: be part of the story. “It’s a strong stake in the ground to say we are Fremantle, we are different and we are proud of it,” said the mayor per a report by The Western Australian.
Visit Anaheim has completed a study that indicates ‘Grandtravel’ is trending, that is, millennials who want to travel with their grandparents. “We were surprised by the enthusiasm that the Millennial survey respondents had for this ‘Grandtravel’ trend,” said Jay Burress, president & CEO of Visit Anaheim. Read the press release here.
“Be a Tourist in Your Hometown” got underway over a recent weekend, designed for locals to beef up on their city’s offerings. Destination Cleveland is gearing up for the larger event in June, “Visit Me in CLE” during which Clevelanders are encouraged to invite out-of-town friends and family to spend some time in Northeast Ohio.
Ch-ch-changes. Shopping malls offering new experiences isn’t helping the tsunami of retail closings due to falling foot traffic, reports CNBC. It’s only April, but so far this year nearly 6,000 store closures have already been announced—more than in all of last year—according to real estate tracking done by Coresight Research. Continue reading here.
