Destination Marketing Podcast Episode 21: Dave Williams Dave Williams: To be able to go from one part to the next just felt like a point of differentiation that nobody else had. Rather than trying to be all things to all people, we thought that would get people looking at Utah and get Utah on the map. Once they were interested in the Mighty Five and went to our website or other websites, they would see all the other amazing things to do around the state. Adam Stoker: 00:24 Welcome once again, everybody, to the Destination Marketing podcast. I'm your host, Adam Stoker, and I have a great episode in store for you today. I'm excited to have our guest. A few months ago, we had Kaitlin Eskelsen from the Utah Tourism Ministry Association on. She talked a little bit about the Mighty Five campaign that the state of Utah did for a few years, and it turned out to be a wildly successful campaign. After talking to her, I thought, "Man, I just want to go a little bit deeper on this campaign.” I reached out to the state of Utah and my friend Dave Williams agreed to join the podcast and talk a little bit about that campaign. Dave, I'm really glad to have you on today. Welcome to the show. Dave Williams: Thank you. I'm excited to be here. Adam Stoker: 01:13 Great. Well, we have a question that we kind of ask everybody to break the ice and get started. I'll ask you the same thing. This is a travel and destination marketing podcast; we're going to talk a little bit about travel. Tell me what your dream destination is. If you could go anywhere in the world, where would it be? Dave Williams: 01:26 Well, of course, I would have to say Utah first, right? I would love to go all over South America. I did a church mission in Columbia and Ecuador and I'd love to go back there. Also go down and see Machu Picchu and Peru and would love to eventually get over to Brazil. I'd like to go all over South America. Adam Stoker: Yeah, you know, I spent two years in Brazil, and I got to say, if that's not on your list, you have to add it because it's a pretty amazing place. Dave Williams: Yeah, definitely. Adam Stoker: Awesome. Okay. South America. Tell me, as far as places you've been, other than Utah, what's your favorite place you've been? Dave Williams: I would probably say Hawaii. I had a great time when I was there. Adam Stoker: Which island did you go to? Dave Williams: I was just on Oahu, but I enjoyed it a lot. There's a lot of places around the world I haven't been yet. Adam Stoker: Tell me a little bit about Hawaii. Tell me about a few of the things you did there that made it somewhere that you love. Dave Williams: 02:18 Definitely loved being on Waikiki Beach, but I can't just sit there on the beach all the time. I have to get up and move around. We went to a more in-depth experience of Pearl Harbor than just the standard least expensive tour. Some people there enabled me to do that. I found that fascinating. We went to the North Shore, went to the Dole Plantation. I mean, all the typical tourist things there, but it was just an amazing trip. I really enjoyed it. Adam Stoker: 02:46 Awesome. You know, I actually was planning on going to Hawaii for the first time this year and we ended up getting pregnant and are having a baby next month. We were going to go in November. That's when we were planning on heading out there. It kind of put a damper on our ability to get to Hawaii this year, but I'm hoping next year we'll get our first time out there. Dave Williams: Oh, good for you. I recommend it. Adam Stoker: Awesome. Well, Dave, tell me a little bit about you and how you ended up in the role that you're in and what you do now with the state. Dave Williams: Okay. Well, I grew up in Bountiful, went to Bountiful High. I went to the University of Utah, got my bachelor’s in marketing. Adam Stoker: That's okay. That's okay. Dave Williams: We did well a few weeks ago, I'll just remind you. Adam Stoker: I deserve that. Dave Williams: Also ... Adam Stoker: 03:33 For those of you that don't know, the University of Utah and BYU played. I'm a BYU fan. Utah won for the ninth time in a row, to the point where it's not even fun anymore to watch the game if you're a BYU fan. That's what Dave's referring to when he says he did well a few weeks ago. Dave Williams: 03:51 Yeah. I'm not complaining. I also went right from getting my bachelor’s degree, into the MBA program at the University of Utah. I got my MBA, and was hired by the Gallup Organization, which is known for the Gallup Bowl. They do a lot of management consulting. They are headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey, but really a family from Nebraska acquired the company. The president, the CEO, the chairman were all in Lincoln, Nebraska. We picked up and moved to Nebraska and worked there for three years. I actually enjoyed it more than we ever would have guessed. I made a lot of good friends there. Then I moved back to Utah to work for I-Omega, which was a high-tech company back in the day. They produced zip drives. That was a billion-dollar company that was located in Roy, Utah. They were a big company at the time. I worked there. They had changes in the hierarchy of the company and the chairman of the company fired the CEO, brought in a new CEO, and said they were going to move the headquarters of the company to San Diego. Then they laid off 1200 people right before 9/11 hit. Adam Stoker: Oh, man. Dave Williams: 05:06 I was in that layoff. I was a product manager at I-Omega. Basically, we all got laid off and the economy was already in recession. Then 9/11 hit, and the recession was worse. I was running into all my I-Omega buddies at every job interview, and eventually got hired by a colleague from I-Omega and got hired to work at Ultra Dents, which is a dental products company in South Jordan. I also did some sales for a company called I-Transact, which was a company that was one of the first companies that had internet payment gateways. The ability to buy things with a credit card online. Then, I heard about a position with the Utah Travel Council, which is now the Utah Tourism. I actually started with the Travel Council as the research coordinator. I have gradually worked my way up. Now I'm the associate managing director. Adam Stoker: Yeah, I see that you've had a variety of roles there at the Office of Tourism. Dave Williams: 06:04 Yeah. I never would have dreamt I'd be here this long but promoting the state of Utah is great. While I started out as the market research guy, I always had my eye on the marketing job, wanted to oversee the marketing campaigns. I was able to move into that role in 2007. It's been a lot of fun. I can't imagine promoting other states in the country. I really enjoy being able to promote Utah. Adam Stoker: You've been in the marketing related role for about 12 years now, then? Dave Williams: Right. Adam Stoker: During that time, how have you seen marketing in general evolve and your role evolve over that time? Dave Williams: 06:44 Well, I say that a lot of things have evolved in marketing in general and here at the Office of Tourism. Just looking at marketing in general, technology has changed everything. The ability to target people at the household level in a way we never have before, to be able to track people and what their interests are online and be able to re-target. Now we're to the point where we can tell if people have actually seen our ads and then actually visited the state. Years ago, we were doing more of a mass marketing approach where we'd do television buys on national cable television or we'd do spot market buys. We were just blasting out to everybody. Now we have addressable TV, connected TV and we can, in addition to all the digital marketing, include other parts of digital marketing. We can be much more of a rifle approach than a shotgun approach. The technology has changed it a lot. For our office, it's also changed. When I started at the office in September of 2003, about a year and a half after the Olympics, we had a marketing budget of $900,000. That's what Vale, Colorado was spending to promote the city of Vale for three months in the summer. Adam Stoker: Oh, wow. Dave Williams: 08:04 I was able to be involved in the creation of the tourism marketing performance fund. Which was a funding mechanism that enabled our marketing fund to grow, as we worked with the industry, to grow sales tax revenue for tourism-related items. Those funds have been able to grow to the point that now, this past year, tourism marketing performance fund had $25 million. Ten percent of that goes straight to the Utah sports commission to attract sporting events to the state, leaving us with $22.5 million. That's a huge difference from $900,000. Adam Stoker: Got to imagine that's a little bit of a game changer. Dave Williams: It's been an amazing ride to see the change in our office and the tourism industry in Utah overall. Adam Stoker: 08:49 This isn't exactly where I had anticipated us going in this conversation, but I want to ask you a follow-up question on that. You went from having $900,000 to attempt marketing nationwide, and in some cases even worldwide. Then once you got this initiative passed, your budget multiplied significantly. What were the initial challenges that came along with that sudden infusion of cash? Dave Williams: Well, they start us out at $10 million. We wouldn't have had that funding without the efforts of Nan Anderson and the Utah, back then it was called the Utah Tourism Industry Coalition. Now, it's called as you know, you said you interviewed Kaitlin at the Utah Tourism Industry Association. They always put forth the best arguments with the legislature for us to get our funding, which we really appreciate. We were basically starting from scratch. I mean, we commissioned an image study towards the end of 2005. They said, "We have good news and we have bad news." The good news was that people overall didn't really have a negative image of Utah, but the bad news was they had no image of Utah whatsoever. Even a few years after hosting the Olympics, we weren't on anybody's radar. We had to create a new brand. That’s when the Life Elevated brand was developed. Adam Stoker: What year was that? Dave Williams: 10:14 It was launched in April of 2006. At that time, Leigh Von Der Esch was the director of the office, and Mike Deaver was the deputy director. They played huge roles in that. Also, we had a new board. The previous board for the office, I think it was a nine-member board, and there was only one person on the entire board that was really from the tourism industry. The legislation that created the tourism marketing performance fund also created a new board, the board of tourism development, which has thirteen members, and it has geographic and industry representation on the board. The board formed committees. We have a cooperative marketing committee because by law, 20% of the money in that fund goes to a co-op marketing program that we had to develop from scratch. Also, the board created a marketing committee, in which, the board approves our out-of-state marketing plan. Our role is really to promote Utah for out-of-state visitors to come into the state, bring new money into the state. Trying to decide how to divide up that money and how to most effectively spend it, the board and the staff spent hours and hours working through that. It was really exciting because we were kind of reinventing the whole office just because now, we had some money to do more initiatives with. We were creating everything from scratch, basically, and we spent a lot of time looking at how other states did it, and then trying to develop programs that we thought would be most effective for Utah. Adam Stoker: Yeah. Dave Williams: A lot of partners to do that, too. A lot of our DMO partners around the state were involved in giving input into those programs. Adam Stoker: 12:08 Dave, as you got that infusion of new budget, I imagine that the kind of accountability that comes along with that was a little bit heavy. You probably realized, "Hey, we've got to get more sophisticated really fast to make sure that we're spending this money as responsibly as possible." What steps did you take to do that? Dave Williams: Well, the legislation that created the funding required that we report it to the legislature annually on the effectiveness for advertising. We issued an RFP, a request for proposal, and hired a firm called Strategic Marketing and Research, Inc. Now it's called Strategic Marketing and Research Insights. They're a firm out of Indiana, a research firm that's used by a lot of other states to measure advertising effectiveness. When we would do a major campaign, they would do a survey in the markets where our ads were running, and they would do two waves of surveys. First, they'd ask people if they had seen the ad. They measure awareness. Were people aware of the ads, and were the ads communicating the message that we wanted communicated? Then, after the season had ended, they would go back and do another survey to find out if people had actually visited. They would extrapolate that based on the population. They'd be able to tell us an estimate for how much revenue the campaign generated in traveler spending. Adam Stoker: Got it. Dave Williams: What the return on investment was for tax revenue. Adam Stoker: That sounds like a pretty manual process at the time. I'm assuming the process is much more automated. You're probably using ADARA or Arrivalist now? Dave Williams: 13:59 We do. We still use that process, but we also definitely use ADARA and Arrivalist. All of those things have just enhanced our ability to measure ourselves, and Vicki Varela, our managing director right now, has challenged us to become the best measured state tourism office in the country. We've worked hard to take advantage of technology to be able to do that, but there's still things we get out of the strategic marketing and research ad effectiveness study that ADARA and Arrivalist aren't able to tell us. Combining all of these studies together gives us our best picture that we've ever had of how we're doing so far. Adam Stoker: Makes sense. Okay. Well, let's fast forward a few years. You come out with the Mighty Five campaign. How did that campaign come about and what was it like to release a campaign that was so recognized? Dave Williams: 14:57 Great question. Our ad agency has been Struck for quite a while. In our advertising, we had been showing Utah's scenery. I mean, we felt our scenery is what set us apart. We had definitely showed National Parks in all of our advertising, starting from 2006 onward. We had done a lot of ads that were kind of funny. We had some humor, but we felt like we were getting a little bit away from the Life Elevated brand and wanted to focus on the fact that people could have these amazing uplifting experiences when they came to Utah. Our contract with the ad agency was up. It was time to write a new proposal. We challenged anyone who responded with a proposal to explain to us how they would do a campaign for our three season or our warm weather marketing. Every year we do a winter and ski related campaign as well, but in the RFP, we challenged them to do a three season or warm weather campaign that built on the Utah Life Elevated brand that was emotional, where we weren't just going for humor, but we want people to feel emotion and something that would set us apart from other states because we had gotten ourselves on the map as far as saying, "Look, Utah's here. We have beautiful scenery and wonderful outdoor recreation, but every western state has beautiful scenery and amazing outdoor recreation. Every single one." In the RFP, we challenged these ad agencies to come up with what we can show that's unique that will set us apart from everybody else? It's a ton of work for these ad agencies to respond to these requests for proposal. I always feel a little bit bad about how much time I know they have to spend on them, but these are huge contracts and we need to know that we're going to make a good decision. They came in with a lot of good proposals from the different ad agencies, but the one from Struck, their proposal was the Mighty Five campaign. Adam Stoker: Okay. Dave Williams: We had the members of our marketing committee from our board that were on the selecting committee for the RFP process. There was concern. I mean, one board member said, "You're basically looking at doing a campaign that only promotes parts of Utah south of I70. What about the other two-thirds of the state? Is this really a smart thing to do?" Adam Stoker: Yep. Dave Williams: 17:34 There was a lot of discussion among the committee, a lot of discussion among our staff about would that be the right decision. We felt that the National Parks were gems that were so close together. Other states, you know, California has a ton of National Parks, too, but they're not close together. To be able to go from one park to the next to the next just felt like a point of differentiation that nobody else had, and rather than try to be all things to all people, we thought this would get people looking at Utah and get Utah on the map. Once they were interested in the Mighty Five and went to our website or other websites, they would see all the other amazing things to do around the state. We made the decision to go for it and go ahead and put that ad together. We worked with the ad agency as they showed us what the plan was for filming the spot. Spent a lot of time reviewing the different aspects of the ad with them. The ad was prepared. During all of this, we went through a transition from Leigh Von der Esch, who had been the director of the office, to Vicki Varelo who was named director of the office. This was in the midst of us preparing the campaign and getting it ready to launch. Vicki came onboard and embraced the campaign and added her additional ideas for launching it. The ad had basically been shot just before Vicki came on board, but she embraced it. We enhanced it with a lot of different items with our digital marketing. We had a lot of display ads. The ad agency had suggested wallscapes in some of our key target markets. Whole building length wraps around buildings promoting the Mighty Five. It was a big launch. It was really successful. Adam Stoker: Well, it obviously turned out to be a good idea when it was all said and done, right? You guys had some major, major success for the state of Utah as a result. Would you mind talking a little bit about that success and then some of the recognition that came along with that campaign? Dave Williams: 20:04 Yeah. I mean, definitely the ad effectiveness results said that the results of the campaign were by far the highest results that we had had in our office. We'd gotten this influx of cash starting in fiscal year 2006 is when we were really able to start doing our first ad campaigns. The Mighty Five launched in 2013. Over that time, we had the best results as far as the ad effectiveness research showed. The ad was named the best integrated campaign by the National Council of State Tourism directors, and we received a Mercury award from that organization. Also, the TV spot by itself was named the best broadcast TV ad by the National Council of State Tourism directors. The campaign also got a platinum award for hospitality sales and marketing international. That's called an Adrian award, and we got a platinum Adrian award for that. We got all of the highest accolades that our tourism industry passes out. Just the media attention we got from the campaign, the social media response was good, and it led to a big jump in our spending and our tax revenue that we're generating. Adam Stoker: 21:34 Yeah. I was going to say. Let's talk numbers. When we're talking about improvement in the transient room tax revenue that you generated, what kind of success did you see? Was it double digits? What was the measurement that you used to decide, "Yes, we crushed it with this campaign?" Dave Williams: I don't have it in front of me right now, but my recollection is it was double digit percent increase. Basically, anyone that saw the ad loved it; we'd go over to the legislature and show the ad and they just loved it. It didn't matter what part of the state they were from because we're all Utahans and we all know those are gems in the state. While there's great things to promote throughout the state, I don't think anyone could see that campaign and not feel proud of what we were doing to promote the state overall. That was the hook. We would say that was the hook to introduce people to the state, and then through our website, our social and our various effort PR, trying to introduce people to the other great parts of the state that we have, too. Adam Stoker: Tell me about that. How was the performance for the areas of the state that didn't necessarily have a national park? Say, Uintah County, Logan, Utah or even Salt Lake. Dave Williams: 23:01 Well, I mean, I know some of our DMO partners felt they were getting left out. Once a year up here at the legislature, UTA puts on Utah Tourism down on the hill. All the DMO partners come and set up our booths in the rotunda and meet with legislators. It's a great event. Before we get into the rotunda, UTA usually hosts a meeting where we meet with all the partners and talk about things that are going on for the legislative session. In that meeting, I was allowed to present the Mighty Five campaign, and there was one DMO marketing director that came up to me after in the rotunda, and he wouldn't shake my hand because he was upset. He was kind of joking, but kind of not really joking, you know. We just asked people to trust us. Overall, I would say it raised the tide, you know, a rising tide lifts all boats. I think it did that for basically the entire state. We have the Utah tourism conference, and sometime after the Mighty Five had been running for a year or two, we brought in Roger Brooks who's a consultant that works with cities and towns to help them improve these destinations. We brought him as a speaker. We asked him to talk about way finding signage and how to make cities and towns more friendly to tourists and developing infrastructure people need to be able to host tourists. We hadn't mentioned the Mighty Five to him and he got up in his speech and he said he and his wife were planning to do a road trip and they were going to come down through Utah and spend about two days in Utah and then spend most of their trip at the Grand Canyon. They saw the Mighty Five ad and it completely changed their trip. He said they stopped in Logan and they stopped in Ogden, they stopped at a station park in Davis County, they stopped in Salt Lake, they went up to Park City, and they stopped in Provo. They ended up spending three or four days in Utah instead of a day and a half or two days because they wanted to go down and road trip through the state. They ended up spending twice as much time in Utah as they did in Arizona. I think people probably thought we paid him to come down and say that, but we had no idea what he was going to say. It was a great endorsement for what we attempted to achieve. Certainly, we've tried to expand, and under Vicki's leadership, we've set aside a significant amount of money that we do for year-round digital advertising of all different parts of the state. We're setting aside a significant amount of money to promote urban Utah and certainly the Wasatch Front the urban part of the state has the infrastructure, has the hotels, has the capacity for more visitors. We've spent more time and money promoting Northern Utah and in 2017, under Vicki's leadership, the Red Emerald initiative was launched, and Vicki introduced that at the tourism conference in 2017, introduced that to the industry. The point of that is less focus on just the quantity of visitors, but we're trying to get the high-quality visitors that come to have unique, amazing trips in Utah. The Red Emerald is a gem that's only found in Utah. Just like it's an amazing, unique gem, we want people to come here and have incredible and unique experiences where they really experience something new and explore. We're trying to get people that will come and stay and really explore Utah. It's not just promoting the Mighty Five parks, but it's promoting all the things around the parks and promoting north to south and every which part of the state. That's what we're focused on, is trying to get these quality visitors that will come explore and continue to spend a lot of money. Adam Stoker: 27:23 Great. Let's talk about moving on from the Mighty Five campaign. I know that you launched the Road to Mighty campaign. Is that the current campaign that you have running? Dave Williams: It's not running right now. What we have running right now we call our Between Campaign. We ran the Mighty Five for three years from 2013 through 2015. In 2016, it was a challenge because we're going, "Okay, what do we do next?" The Road to Mighty concept that Struck helped us develop was basically saying, I mean, we know people are going to come and see the national parks and even recently we've done a lot of qualitative interview research where we know people are going to visit the parks. The goal is to be able to help them expand and also see the national monuments, the historic sites, the state parks, the scenic byways and all the great activities to do in urban Utah. We ran the Road to Mighty campaign. We did that from 2016 through 2018. Then last year, we call it our Between Campaign. Basically, it talks about the amazing things that there are to visit and amazing things to see and do between the national parks. We're trying to spread that visitation around. We've definitely seen an increase in state park visitation. Some of our state parks, I think, you could put up against national parks if you got Snow Canyon or Dead Horse Point or Goblin Valley. Our national monuments are incredible, too. Now I think we have the most accredited Dark Sky Parks in the entire country. Most of the national parks and most of the monuments are all credited parks for dark skies. The state parks are doing that as well. There’s so much to promote, and we're trying to help people understand that. It's not just show up to Zion for three hours and try to hike Angel's Landing and move on, but trying to get people to really explore. Adam Stoker: 29:46 Great. Well, I want to talk about, and kind of shift gears for a little bit, and talk about a couple of other things before we run out of time. I want to talk a little bit about how, the state of Utah has some unique programs that as I've gotten out and I've interacted with some other states, some of their programs aren't necessarily as sophisticated or maybe as regional friendly as what I think Utah has put together. I'd love it if you talk a little bit about, for example, the co-op program that I know has been really valuable for the rural areas of the state and the regional portions of the state, along with the cafeteria plan I know you used to have, but I know you have the Brand USA projects that go out-of-country and some of the educational programs that you guys put on as a state tourism board. Dave Williams: 30:38 Okay. Well, as I mentioned earlier, the legislation that provides the funding for the tourism marketing performance fund requires that 20 percent of that money go towards a cooperative marketing program. The first program that we developed, we called it the Traditional Marketing Cooperative Program. It allows DMOs, cities and counties to apply for matching funds to promote their destination or their event to out-of-state visitors. It's a matching program. If they request $50,000 from our office and they're awarded that money, they also have to spend $50,000 of their own money towards the same project all for out-of-state marketing. It becomes a $100,000 promotion. We developed the program to work for both large and small entities. Also, non-profit entities can apply for this money. People can apply from $1,000 in matching funds all the way up to $275,000 in matching funds. Adam Stoker: Okay. Dave Williams: 31:51 The nice thing about the program is they come to us saying, "Here's what we want to promote. We want to promote our county, or our city or this event. Here's where we're going to and here's our target market. We're going to reach them through digital or print," or however people want to do it. We have a committee on our board that reviews each application. We usually get more applications than we're able to fund. We usually get anywhere between 45 to 60 applications. The committee on our board reviews each one and gets to set a criteria. There's an application that they all have to fill out. They also interview the applicants, and the committee scores them and takes that recommendation to the full board, and then the board votes to award funding. That's allowed a lot of flexibility where you might have a smaller entity that just needs some funding to try to get their website going better or a large entity like Visit Salt Lake that would use it to promote Salt Lake City and everything in between. Adam Stoker: 33:01 Yeah. You know, Dave, I think that's such a great program. I've talked to several destinations across the country and I tell them about the co-op program that the state of Utah has, and I say, "Does your state provide the same kind of matching funds or anything like that?" The response in several cases has been, "I wish our state would do something like that." I'm not going to out the states that don't have those programs here on the podcast, but I know that that's a fairly unique thing. There are other states that do it, but I think it's a huge value to the different regions within the state and nonprofit businesses within the state to promote the state outside of Utah. I just think that's a really cool program that helps every part of the state. Yeah. Dave Williams: 33:49 I've seen other states that have co-op programs. They don't usually allow that level of flexibility, and I know it's not easy because we require the applicants to try to project what they think their results are going to be. They have to track the results of their efforts and we pay them part of the money upfront, but we don't pay them the balance of the money until they turn in a final report sharing their results with us. The legislature likes it because there's accountability tied to the program, and I know it's been hard for the DMO partners to try to project what those results would be, and we've tried to assist them with that. The program has worked out well because it provides a lot of flexibility to the DMOs. I have to say; I don't sit with the marketing committee. Kelly Day manages our co-op marketing program. She and I score the applications that request $10,000 or less. Then, the co-op committee from our board scores all the other applications. Kelly and I sit there and help them tally the scores, but we're not the ones that are judging. It's really amazing to sit there and hear people come in and present what they're doing. There's amazing projects and things being promoted all over the state. Every time I come away from those co-op marketing interviews just really energized and enthusiastic because there's so much good work being done by our DMO partners. It really is a team effort. The marketing performance fund group, because the industry as a whole grew the revenue. It wasn't just our office by ourselves. To me, that's been one of the most fun things to see overall is how the industry has come together, all different parts of the state working together to promote the state as a whole. It's been really good. Adam Stoker: Good. Dave Williams: 35:49 That's the traditional marketing program. Then we have our cafeteria program where we have, we call it cafeteria because there's basically just like having a cafeteria menu of food items. We have a menu of some marketing projects that people can do. A lot of those have been in conjunction with Brand USA. In the past, we've had some for developing content. That program continues to evolve. It was getting pretty complicated for a while. We've tried to scale it back and simplify it, but it's still there. You can go to travel.utah.gov and click on partner marketing opportunities. There you can get all the information about both the cafeteria co-op and the traditional program. Adam Stoker: Great. Dave Williams: 36:42 I should add that a new part of the cafeteria program is going to be centered around destination development. We've done some destination development things in the past, but we're working with two pilot counties right now. We're working with Carbon County and Beaver County, where we've got different consultants lined up that are helping them figure out what they have to promote, how to brand themselves, try to put together an action plan for how they can actually improve their destinations and what they can do from an infrastructure standpoint. Currently, we don't have money to give out for infrastructure, but we have a whole destination development program that we're working on with these pilot counties. We're getting close to the point of being able to launch that to all of the counties that want to get some assistance with destination development. Adam Stoker: 37:43 Yeah, Dave, that sounds like a great initiative. As the tourism numbers continue to increase here in the state of Utah, infrastructure and destination development, I think, becomes more and more of a priority. I love that you guys are getting ahead of it and launching that program. We’re running out of time here, I just want to ask you one more question, and then we'll probably wrap up. Most of our listeners are destination marketers, but for a local or regional destination, right? Think, for example, you mentioned Carbon County and Beaver County. I think those would be similar to the types of destinations that are listening to our podcast. A question that I want to ask you, is how can these regional destinations do a better job of working with and gaining support from the state convention and visitors bureau to make sure that they're working together effectively? Dave Williams: 38:42 Well, for these types of counties, that's kind of what the destination development program has in mind because some of them lack the resources or they just need to get some things in place that they can be better prepared as a tourism destination. You can't just start doing huge multimillion-dollar campaigns if you don't have the infrastructure in place. You've got to have a place for people to stay. You've got to have restaurants. You've got to have things for them to do after five o'clock at night when they come off the trail or whatever outdoor recreation activity they're doing. Careful planning is important. We're trying to help them with that. We're trying to help these counties create their own plans with their own stakeholders to develop their destination the way they want it to be. We're not trying to tell them what to do. I would say I want everybody to understand that we're trying the best we can to try and promote all over the state, and there's times in the past where our office has asked all the DMO partners, "Tell us your top five things that you want us to promote." As we work with our PR firm and do our different initiatives, it would really help us to know what are the top five things you want us to be talking about. Sometimes we get a good response from a lot of counties, and sometimes we don't hear from any counties. Then it feels like sometimes those are the counties that are frustrated that we're not doing as much to promote their area. We're trying to reach out and we just appreciate it if everybody can be as responsive as they can. If you have suggestions for us, let us know. We want to have an ongoing dialogue with all our partners. We try to get our staff around the state as much as we can, but if you have questions or concerns or ideas for us, I would say please pick up the phone or send us an email and communicate with us because we'd love to hear from you. You know, if you ask me what I've enjoyed about being with the state tourism office for 16 years, the most rewarding part of it for me is the friendships all over the state. We really do value the work that our DMO partners are doing, and to me, that's the most fun part of the job is getting to know people in different areas of Utah. I just tell the DMOs, please continue to work with us and give us your suggestions, ideas, and know that we don't have unlimited staff or unlimited resources, but we're doing the best we can, and we want their feedback and we want their ideas. Adam Stoker: 41:42 Yeah, you know, I think that's a good point, though, because communication and relationship building can get you a really long way in trying to partner and garner support from an entity like the state tourism board. I love your comments there. Dave Williams: Well, if I could, can I just add one more point to that? Adam Stoker: Absolutely. Dave Williams: 42:02 Our managing director, Vicki Varelo, is leading us on a strategic planning process right now. As part of that process, we have sent out electronic surveys to stakeholders all over the state. We actually got a really good response and we also did some verbal interviews with some stakeholders. We couldn't obviously, you know, we've got over 300 or nearly 400 responses to the electronic survey, and we couldn't do verbal interviews with everybody. The response was really good from our standpoint and we really appreciate that people were willing to take the time and give us their input as we try to continue to develop our strategic plan and try to improve as an office. Like I said before, it really is a team effort with all of our DMO partners and our private sector partners throughout the state. We appreciate everybody's support. Adam Stoker: Awesome. Well, thank you, Dave. It's been great to have you on the podcast today. I think we've gotten a lot of valuable information. Thanks for coming on. Dave Williams: Thank you, Adam. Appreciate what you and Relic are doing to make these podcasts and giving people a way to hear what's going on all over Utah. Adam Stoker: 43:15 All right. Well, everybody, a couple reminders for you before we go. First of all, we have a LinkedIn group called Destination Marketers, and we're getting new people joining every day. I encourage you to go, request access. That's where we're going to be. For example, Jim Bartoo who we had on last week with the Nashville Zoo, that's where he and I were able to connect and arrange for him to be on the podcast as a guest; talking about zoos and how important they are to a destination and how a destination can better interact. That all came from our destination marketers LinkedIn group. I encourage you all to join. We're going to post articles and more and more learnings that we find together as Destination Marketers and continue to grow and develop. The other thing I want to remind everybody is that reviews are critical to any podcast. If you're enjoying what you've been listening to and the numbers say that you're either enjoying it or you're just powering through it for some reason. I hope you're enjoying it. Leave us a review. Help us with that five-star rating. We can continue to climb up the find ability charts, which isn't a real thing, but I think you know what I mean. Thanks everybody for listening. This has been another great episode of the Destination Marketing podcast. We'll talk to you soon. Page of 15
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