Destination Marketing Podcast Episode 24: Leif Pettersen
Leif Pettersen: And if it makes you a little bit nervous, it's probably going to be great. Draw the line at panic. If you start to panic, probably a bad idea, but if you are anywhere between, I'm bored and a little nervous, you're going in the right direction. Adam Stoker: Welcome again everybody to another episode of the Destination Marketing Podcast. I'm your host Adam Stoker and glad to be back with a normal episode this week. Thanks for bearing with me last week as I was recording from home. Although it was fun to get to know Kyle and learn a little bit about the man behind the computer. He puts a lot of the episodes together, does a lot of editing work and has to edit out a bunch of the weird, dumb, annoying stuff that I say. It's nice to have him protecting my reputation there on the editing. Thanks, Kyle, for being with us last week. We've got another great guest for you guys today. I touched a little bit on this guest and that I was excited to bring him on. We haven't talked PR a lot and today we have Leif Pettersen. Leif, welcome to the show. Leif Pettersen: Thank you. I'm happy to be here. Adam Stoker: Well we're excited to have you on. We're going to dive into all things PR. I read your bio that you've got on your LinkedIn page and for anybody that hasn't seen Leif's bio, you need to go check it out because that alone, is like a podcast episode in its entirety. I want to talk about a few things in there if that's okay. First, every single episode we always ask people, and you're a pretty well-traveled guy so you're going to have some good answers to this, but if you could go anywhere in the world, what's your dream destination? Leif Pettersen: Okay, well I mean that changes from moment to moment, but at this moment I am plotting to finally get to Argentina. Not original, but I've never found the time and had the ability to take the time off and also have the money. I always either have too much time and not enough money or the other way around. So, Argentina, I want to go there and do it right, for three weeks. Also, I haven't been to, strangely enough because we're going to talk about this later, I haven't been to Romania in almost 10 years. I really miss it and I would love to go back there. Adam Stoker: All right. So leading into our next question, is that your favorite place you've ever visited? Leif Pettersen: Oh, I have a very complicated emotional relationship with Romania. It's a fantastic place to visit, it's a challenging place to live. I did live there for about a year and a half, and most of that time was before they joined the European Union. Things were a little less reliable in terms of, hot water being available every day, stuff like that. The internet just disappearing. I lived there during a challenging time. By all accounts, it's much better. The food is good. Back, even just 10 years ago, you didn't eat food in Romania for enjoyment, you just ate it to forestall death. There was no joy in the food and now it's having this huge uptick, they just need the tourism people to show up. Adam Stoker: Okay. So you want to go experience the other side of Romania, maybe the more enjoyable side, it sounds like. Leif Pettersen: I haven't done a trip around Romania just for pure leisure in more than a decade. Actually, I'm going to say it was 2005 the last time I did that. Every other time has been work-related. So yes, I want to go and be a tourist and revisit the country where I've spent the most time outside of the United States. Adam Stoker: Awesome. You brought up Argentina and you said you need three weeks to do it right. Leif Pettersen: Minimum. Adam Stoker: What are the major milestones or the major attractions that you would have on your list if you were to go to Argentina? Leif Pettersen: This isn't very original at all. I'm a big fan of beef and I'm a big fan of red wine and I just want to swim through that stuff, all the way, back and forth across the whole country. You need at least three weeks for that. Adam Stoker: Got it. Okay. Leif Pettersen: I want beef, breakfast, lunch and dinner. I want wine all day. I want a Camelback of red wine that's just on me at all times. I mean I'm sure there's worthwhile tourism stuff to do. I haven't done the leg work for that, but you can't have a conversation about Argentina without hearing about the beef and the wine. And I've been hearing about this for 20 years now. One of these days, I've got to set that time aside and go do it. Adam Stoker: See, I was thinking we were going to go down the vegetarian tourism path today and it sounds like maybe we're not going to talk that much about vegetarian tourism? Leif Pettersen: I have no idea what you're talking about. I mean, I'll eat a vegetable if it's hidden in amongst beef, no, I'm just kidding. I'm a fan of vegetables. But I am far from a vegetarian. If I don't have some sort of meat based protein, I get a little twitchy. Adam Stoker: Okay, got it. That's good. Meat tourism, huge marketing opportunity for the persona of Leif Pettersen. Leif Pettersen: Right. If you need a guy that is just absolutely insatiable, and the money to send them somewhere, I'm your guy. I only weigh 160 pounds, but you will be shocked at how much I can eat. Adam Stoker: How much beef you can put down? Leif Pettersen: Exactly. Adam Stoker: Got it. Well, outside of beef, there's more to your background, right? Leif Pettersen: We haven't even gotten to my background. Adam Stoker: We haven't even done it yet. Tell us a little bit about who you are and you've obviously done a lot of work with destinations, touch a little bit on the personal and the professional, just tell us about who you are. Leif Pettersen: The reason why my LinkedIn bio seems like it's a big saga is because I'm old, I'm 49, I'm knocking on the door of 50. I've had a lot of time to do these things. Until I was 33, I didn't even work in tourism. I worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. I was an electronic payments analyst. It wasn't until 2003 when I did the story that you read about a lot now, I had a little lifestyle crisis. I quit my job, sold everything, just liquidated everything I had so I had all the cash. I bought my first laptop ever and some other tech, a good camera and I just hit the road. I had no writing experience, I had no connections. I thought, well, worst case scenario, I spend a couple of years traveling the world and then I go back to work at the Federal Reserve Bank. But when you do nothing but travel and write for months and months straight, despite having zero experience, I just sort of by accident got good at it. Adam Stoker: Wow. That's a pretty unique path, right? Leif Pettersen: Right. Adam Stoker: From banking, to writing and traveling and PR. Leif Pettersen: Convincing people that bad grammar wasn't a disqualifier for being a travel writer because you should have seen some of my early stuff. A lot of the editors were very forgiving because I was able to inject humor in pretty much any scenario. Even the driest content, I could sort of liven it up so people wouldn't start skimming. Adam Stoker: That's great stuff. Before we get more into your writing, I’ve got to know what was the catalyst, what caused you to say I'm doing it and made you dive in? Leif Pettersen: There was a lot of things going on back then. I had been recently divorced, but more than that, I had been working at the Federal Reserve Bank for nine years. I was a theater major in college and then I ended up as an electronic payments analysts. You can just see the growing, just the collision was going to happen sooner or later with me going, "I hate this. Why has it taken me so long to figure this out?" Back in 2003 you could sell a house for a huge profit. I don't know if you remember that; I'd only owned the house for three years and I sold it for 100%. I doubled my money. I put a lot of sweat into that house. It needed a lot of work. So it wasn't like I just sat there and scooped in the cash. That house needed everything done to it. Leif Pettersen: After I sold that house, I had a very, very nice nest egg. Most people don't have that opportunity, but I'd worked very diligently for nine years, saved all that up, and I got very lucky with the housing market. I realized, one day I was like, "I can do whatever I want. I've got the money. I can literally do whatever I want for the first time in my life." So, I did. I followed through on that and I lived the dream. Adam Stoker: Oh, that's great. Leif Pettersen: Although you know the dream… Adam Stoker: Better that than never Leif Pettersen: Yeah, well no, people even then, people are like, "You're doing this at age 33, you are ruining your life. What are you going to do about health insurance? You're never going to get your career back. Are you insane?" My whole family, everyone I knew, they were pretty sure I was going to die out there. It's like, "I'm just going to go backpacking." Adam Stoker: Well, let's talk about some of the places you went. Where did you go? Then as you go through that, tell me a little bit about how that morphed into PR. Leif Pettersen: Well, the goal was to cover as much territory as possible. I wanted to be a travel writer and I had no experience writing. I had done some backpacking in a few countries, but I didn't have the destinations under my belt that I needed. I didn't have the expertise anywhere, so I hit the road hard. I covered a lot of Western and Central Europe the first year. Then I spent my first summer in Romania. And then after that I bolted off to Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia. By that time, it had been a year into my little adventure and I'd already gotten a few clippings and I had a couple of clients. I already had some work. I got paid to do some work in Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia. It was slowly building like any normal resume process. Leif Pettersen: The only country in Western Europe I still haven't been to is Finland. I don't know why I can't get there. I've covered a lot of those countries in Southeast Asia. I was doing it for two reasons, like I said, to get the destinations under my belt, but I also just wanted to see the planet. Even though I'd been fortunate enough to see some of Europe already, I wanted to get it all under my belt. If it was going to be a limited adventure, and I was going to have to end up back at the Federal Reserve in a couple of years, I had a lot of territory to cover. Adam Stoker: Yeah, for sure. While you were traveling, did you join a circus? Tell me a little bit about how you got the talent of juggling and escaping a straitjacket. Did those happen at the same time or was that spread out in different destinations? How did this happen? Leif Pettersen: I can't tell you the story about escaping straight jacket until certain legal things are resolved. Adam Stoker: Interesting. Leif Pettersen: But I started juggling when I was a little kid, when I was 12. I saw another little kid who was even younger than me, juggling on TV. And I was like, "Well, if that stupid little kid can do it, then I can," and it turns out that little kid turned into one of the greatest jugglers in the history of humanity. I was inspired by the right people and I taught myself how to juggle. I did it all through high school, college, I did it professionally for a while. But juggling professionally, if you do anything you love for money, it just stops being stuff that you love. It just becomes work. I backed off from performing professionally and I became a hobbyist and I've been doing it now for 30 something years. I've competed in the world championships twice now. In my 40s which is not the age when people do a competition that's so physically and mentally taxing. I mean juggling is kind of like a lot of Olympic sports, by the time you get to your mid to late 20s, you're done. To compete that old, I had to do a lot of training. I also had to take into account the fact that I was old, and I could hurt myself a lot easier and I got tired a lot faster and things like that. But the straight jacket, it's actually a very simple story. I just needed to make my show longer back in the ‘90’s, I needed to add some time that wasn't just me juggling because that's exhausting. I needed something where I was standing and not juggling and talking and the straitjacket was it. I found a straitjacket, which is not easy to do, and I worked it into my act. The rest is history. Adam Stoker: That's amazing. Leif Pettersen: But if I ever get snapped up, I am not going to be there for long. The padded room cannot hold me. Adam Stoker: From the sounds of it, that's good because you can't stay in one place for very long, right? Leif Pettersen: Well, that used to be the case. I'm almost 50 now. I'm kind of a homebody, believe it or not. I'm sitting in my living room now, and this is pretty much where I'm happiest. Adam Stoker: Nice. Well, I guess when you've seen the whole world. Leif Pettersen: Much of the world, I have barely stepped foot in Africa and South America. I still have lots of territory to cover there, but I've got to earn money and pay the mortgage. There's a certain balance that I have to keep now that I didn't have to think about back in the salad days of my little golden nest egg that I had and very little responsibility. Adam Stoker: Nice. Well, just so you know, and we haven't talked about this ahead of time, but I also have the ability to juggle. Probably not at the talent level that you are at from the sounds of it. I will not be competing in the world championships at any point in my life, but I can juggle and I can ride a unicycle, but I can't do the two things at the same time. Can't do it. Leif Pettersen: I can barely do that myself. But hey, any level of juggling is good for the brain. I don't know if you've done the research because nobody has, but I'll ask you that question out of politeness. I've learned over the years that juggling is actually extremely good for the brain. It's one of the only things that they've studied. It's probably not the only thing, but it's the only thing that they've studied that shows the actual gray and white matter growing as you learn how to juggle and continue juggling. Juggling literally makes you smarter. So Adam, you've chosen well and I encourage you to keep doing that so that when you get older you're still sharp. Adam Stoker: Yeah. My wife would say I probably need to juggle more often then. Leif Pettersen: She's probably got a lot on her mind right now. She doesn't need to worry about that. Adam Stoker: Yeah, she's actually at the hospital with our baby right now and she's got a lot going on. Let's dive into PR. Before we dive specifically into it, you've written a couple of books and I want to have you tell a little bit about both of those books. Then I want to talk about destinations and really give our listeners the specific value of PR strategy for their destination, and some ideas and tools they can use. Tell us about your books because I think they're both really interesting. Leif Pettersen: Since we're talking about juggling, my most recent book is called “Throwing Up, Notes From 35 Years of Juggling”. There weren’t any juggling memoirs out there. I noticed there were memoirs for clowns, embroiderers and tennis players, so I thought, well juggling needs a memoir. So here I go. I wrote that knowing that it would be a very small audience, but shockingly, being a book about juggling and self-published, it's selling pretty well. I'm kind of shocked. Yeah, I thought I would only sell it at juggling festivals and stuff like that. But no, my online sales have been pretty steady. My first book, which is travel related, is called, “Backpacking With Dracula”. That is all based on my time working and living in Romania, and about Vlad the Impaler, the 15th century Prince of Wallachia; which is in modern day Romania. He was well known for being kind of a psychopath, but also, he's considered a hero for Romania since he single-handedly held off the Ottoman Empire from invading Christian Europe for several years. Traveling and working in Romania, I visited all these surviving sites associated with Vlad the Impaler and from there, I finally had to read the Dracula novel, of course. The book is half history about Vlad the Impaler, how he reappeared in modern times as a blood sucking monster. But also it's a travel memoir. Because as a Lonely Planet guidebook author, in a country just before they join European Union, you can imagine I had certain challenges getting around and getting my job done. That's where the love hate relationship with Romania is very clearly spelled out there at great length. I finally did a travel memoir, and that's also doing well. It tends to sell well around Halloween, between Halloween and Christmas. Everybody wants a Dracula book. Another book that I self-published, even though vampires were out, and it was all about zombies. I've managed to convince people to learn more about the actual Dracula. Adam Stoker: Can our listeners find those books on Amazon? Leif Pettersen: Yes. Both of them. Adam Stoker: Perfect. All right, well we'll have to have our listeners check that out and post in the LinkedIn group, Destination Marketers LinkedIn group, what they thought of the books. So I'll get back to you with some feedback. Leif Pettersen: All right. Halloween's coming up, you got to get your Halloween bags or stockings, whatever you do and fill them with Dracula books. Adam Stoker: That's right. That's right. Leif Pettersen: Which is what everybody wants. They want to read instead of eat candy. I don't know. Adam Stoker: I wish my kids would read instead of eating candy. Leif Pettersen: Well they need this book. Although it is a PG-13 topic, there's a lot of violence. Maybe give them some time. Adam Stoker: Yeah, we'll give them a couple of years. Let's talk about destinations and PR. It's hard to stand out. It's so hard, especially with destinations. One of the things that I've seen is it's difficult to create urgency. What I mean by that is the media outlets know that your destination isn't going anywhere. Unless you've got some event, or unless you've got the eclipse that’s only visible from your destination or something like that, it's really hard to get that news coverage that you're looking for. Tell us a little bit about what you've seen, how you've been able to get some coverage for destinations and we'll go from there. Leif Pettersen: Well you've probably covered this in previous episodes, but as you just mentioned there, there has to be a hook. There has to be a peg which we use, it's like a time or event related issue going on. We call that a peg in travel writing. That's the peg, like the Superbowl happening in your town or something like that, that's the peg. Also, there has to be something. If you send out and blizzard everyone with information about what hotel got a new pool or some place that's reopening after renovations, your right, it's going to be virtually impossible outside of a few maybe niche publications or outlets to get anybody chattering about that. There has to be, why is this important now or why is this relevant now, and most destinations don't have an answer to that on a monthly basis or even an annual basis. I live in Minneapolis in Minnesota and we are, I'm not afraid to say, maybe one of the greatest destinations in the country, but that's my slight bias. Adam Stoker: I've been there. I actually agree. You've got the best airport in the United States. Leif Pettersen: Don't we? Not only is it great to hang out, but it's so easy to get to. I live in downtown Minneapolis. It costs $2 to get out there. It takes 22 minutes. There is no other airport that I've been to in the United States that costs that little. You can get there fast on public transport. I just had to throw that out there. Adam Stoker: Yep. I love it. Leif Pettersen: Even Minneapolis, we're in the Midwest, people joke about how we ride moose and trade animal pelts or whatever, there's snow on the ground eight months a year. There's stuff like that we're battling. That isn't something that’s going to get somebody to write about it. Just because Minneapolis is a happening place; you still need something else there. Why is this important now? If you don't have that, you have to get extremely creative. Adam Stoker: Let's talk about getting creative then, because you're headed exactly where I want to go. There are things that destinations can do to create, I'm going to coin a word here, newsworthiness. Is that a word? Newsworthiness? Leif Pettersen: I think so. Adam Stoker: Okay. All good. Then didn't coin it, it should be if it's not, right? Leif Pettersen: Exactly. Adam Stoker: There are things that destinations can do outside of having an event. How do you get the story to be interesting enough for somebody to want to publish it? Leif Pettersen: There's two things at play here. If you want to get into a certain publication, you're going to have to be laser focused on what their readers are into, what their demographics are. I mean this is again, this is pitching 101 for a travel writer when they're pitching magazines or even websites now since magazines and print are all closing shop. The San Francisco Chronicle, a newspaper I contributed to, the travel section finally closed down, and it was a very good travel section. Now they're just gone. It's heartbreaking. My Minneapolis Star Tribune here has got a pretty good travel section that's still going along. They have a full-time editor. These things are closing down around the country and you have to take into account the format or the platform, which now is almost always going to be digital. Who that's going to appeal to, and if you're going to target one place like Buzzfeed, you've got to make it absolutely irresistible to that platform. If you're casting a wide net, then there's all kinds of creativity out there. If you can do something that gets attention, something goofball, especially, people will glom onto that. I'm sure you're familiar with Nebraska's somewhat recent campaign. Nebraska, it's not for everybody. It got worldwide coverage. It was so good. I actually interviewed Nebraska tourism's CEO or president on my podcast, Passport Marketing PR podcast. He was a talker; we got a lot of long stories. It was fascinating the way Nebraska has to do to gain attention and the risks they're willing to take, which is rare in travel or destination marketing. A lot of people, their reputation and keeping all this, they're trying to satisfy people from ages three to 93. You can't offend anybody and they're just so overly careful with missteps that, ironically, that leads them to failure. Adam Stoker: Yep. Everything becomes so vanilla. If you're not telling a story, and if you're not afraid to be different and stand out, right? Leif Pettersen: Right. Exactly. I mean failure is going to happen one way or another and I think too many CVBs and other PR folks, the suggestion that failure can't happen. It's got to work; it's got to work at least a little bit. So, they don't take risks. I feel like failure, and I'm not alone here, I think failure is just a learning opportunity. You figure out what works and you apply it to the next thing. Maybe you spent a couple, $10,000, whatever, but you learned a lesson. I don't think failure should be a disqualifier. I think creativity and guts will go a long way. Nebraska has proven that. Adam Stoker: Yeah, I think Nebraska is a great example. I was going to ask you if you are you familiar with Snowbird Resort here in Utah? Leif Pettersen: No, I'm not much of a skier though. Adam Stoker: Snowbird Resort is one of the, in my opinion, best ski resorts in the country. They did something really interesting. Their agency, who wasn't us at Relic, but another agency here in Utah that does brilliant work. They were looking through the reviews that Snowbird had gotten on Google. They looked at the reviews and there were a couple, all the reviews are amazing, and then there's a couple of one-star reviews. They looked at this and they said, "What if we took the one-star review that says the terrain is too expert, it was too hard, and I fell down?" They take that, and I can't remember exactly what it said. I should pull it up here. They made a huge print ad with a picture of the mountain with just the review and the one-star. Leif Pettersen: That's brilliant. Adam Stoker: I've never seen a print ad get so much media coverage as that one. I mean it was on the cover of Ad Age for a minute. It was one of the best PR campaigns and it was tied to traditional advertising. They did something completely different, completely out of the box and now everybody was telling the story as a result. Anyway, same type of thing, right? Leif Pettersen: Yeah. I mean they took a risk. I mean it probably didn't even cost them that much to test it out and then when it took off, that's just free money. There are all kinds of examples of that. If you don't have a peg to work with, you can make your peg by doing something weird, unusual or goofball. I mean, people love goofball. Which is why I've been so successful. Adam Stoker: Which is why you're a great interview on the podcast, by the way. Leif Pettersen: I did something similar, this was back when I was tourism communications manager for Mall of America. You probably heard about it, maybe. We needed something to happen that year and I was trying to figure out a way to get a lot of attention for very little money. I'd seen that Heathrow airport had done a writer in residence and Amtrak had done a writer in residence and I was like, "Okay, how about writer in residence at the largest mall in North America? People are going to either love that or hate that. Either way they're going to talk about it." And I was right. Leif Pettersen: We did a little contest. There was, oh golly, there was 1400 submissions for people to be the writer in residence at Mall of America. They would get all expenses paid travel, hotel and whatever and they just had to sit in the mall and write. It got coverage. It wasn't all positive coverage because even people here in Minnesota are kind of like, "Mall of America, why?" But it got people talking and I think we spent less than $5,000, we got global coverage for that. Adam Stoker: Wow. See, that's great. Leif Pettersen: That was the contest, when the guy actually showed up and did his thing, they didn’t get quite as much coverage, but still a lot of free coverage. Because they ended up picking this poet who wrote poems for people, custom poems right on the spot. He had a little old dinky, old timey typewriter and he would write poems. People would just come up, sit down, they'd talk for a few minutes, he'd write them a poem. That that took off again and they got even more exposure. Adam Stoker: I think takeaway here then, in this specific discussion, is get creative and create your own peg. Whether that's from a messaging standpoint, whether it's from a unique storytelling angle or even a stunt of some sort, like you did with having this guy come in and be a live-in writer in the Mall of America. Leif Pettersen: Finland has the air guitar championships over the year and that always gets coverage, things like that. If people try too hard it loses its punch, but if you're diligent about it and obviously I even stole the idea from other folks, but I made it my own. You just take little pieces of things that you like, swirl it around, put it in the blender, make it relevant to your destination and then put it out there. Worst case scenario, it goes nowhere. You spend a few thousand dollars, you learn what doesn't work and then you move on to the next thing. Adam Stoker: And PR, much like marketing, it's either a success or you learn. There's no such thing as failure. I think you mentioned that earlier. I think it's great advice. Leif Pettersen: Yes. I don't think it's as rare as I'm making it sound, but I mean, I just encounter so many destinations that view failure as, I mean they've got people they answer to, there cannot be failure because the people up three or four levels above their pay grade will get upset with them and maybe it'll affect their budget. They've got people to answer to. It makes them close down, rather than pitch this idea to them with supporting evidence. You can go, "Hey, look what Nebraska did. Look what Finland did. Look what Mall of America did. I'd like to do something like this." Only a lunatic would say, "No, I don't think that's good, we'll just keep on going with the print ads that show canoeing or whatever." Adam Stoker: The trick is, look at things that have been successful, and don't just copy and do the same thing, but create your own spin. Which is what you did at the Mall of America, it's what Nebraska did. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. Have you seen, every year on ESPN they feature, I can't remember what the country is that does this, but they have people that stand at the top of a hill and they try to race a wheel of cheese to the bottom of a hill. Have you seen that? Leif Pettersen: That's somewhere in the UK. I can't remember. I mean, I want to say Wales or Scotland, one of those places. But yeah, I've seen that video or a video with that kind of footage, dozens of times. Adam Stoker: Well, it's every year. ESPN covers this every year because it's weird. Also, you're wondering if somebody's going to get really hurt rolling down that hill. But it's a unique thing that gets people talking. Even if it's weird and zany, like you're saying, you said people like goofball. There are multiple examples of how that works. Leif Pettersen: Right, exactly. If goofball is not your thing or you did something goofball last year and you're taking some downtime, there are other ways to do that. My favorite recent example of that is what Pure Michigan has been doing on their social media. They've had very successful social media that has driven their website traffic through the roof. If you can't do a stunt or, a campaign, like we've been talking about, doing something different in your social media and again, taking risks is what it's all about. No one's going to pay more attention to you because you do something a little different. I don't know if you've seen Fodor's, the guidebook Fodor's Twitter stream in the past year or so. They've revived Mr. Fodor, whatever, I forgot his first name and he's pretending to be this ancient old Twitter novice and it's hilarious. It's super funny. Every day, it's some other thing that he's discovering, learning how to use Twitter or traveling in the modern age. I love it. Another example I used in a previous presentation, they don't have the same social media manager anymore, but Webster's Dictionary. For a very long time they had this social media person that was doing these excellent tweets that were usually tied to some goofball political or current event thing. They would find a word that it was associated with, give the definition of that word and tie it into whatever current event thing they found. It was always very funny and clever. Those tweets would run wild. Adam Stoker: Oh, that's great. There are dozens of examples. Hundreds of examples. The trick is to just do it. Don't sit there and wait for the best idea in the world to come to you. Try something, take action. Leif Pettersen: If it makes you a little bit nervous, it's going to be great. Adam Stoker: Politics and religion, the two things you probably want to stay away from. But other than that, yes, I would agree with you. Leif Pettersen: I mean, draw the line at panic, if you start to panic, probably a bad idea. But anywhere between, I'm bored and a little nervous, you're going in the right direction. Adam Stoker: I like it. Well tell me, you've obviously been out there and seen a lot. Tell me some of the mistakes that you've seen, that you feel like our listeners would want to avoid. Leif Pettersen: Oh boy. Goodness. Well, one mistake, which I've now seen twice, really irritates me because it's so basic. A certain state, certain couple of States now, have put out new video campaigns, just giving the destination marketing thing in some high production value video. The video has got people pouring wine, laughing in a cabin, and maybe walking, playing with a dog and then you get to the end of the video and you realized where was that? That could have been, if the logo of the place hadn't been in the lower right-hand corner of the video, that could've been anywhere. They spent all this money on a video that could have been literally anywhere. No one's going to travel to your state when your state has the exact same stuff as their state; they're going to stay in their own state. I don't want to say who it is, the first time I did this, I used this in a presentation. It wasn't until almost two minutes into their video that they showed a five minute, no, I'm sorry, a five second clip of something that was definitely that destination, like, "Oh, I know where that is." But it wasn't until then. That drove me crazy that we had to sit that long and watch people pour wine. It could have been anywhere. Now another state has just done that, I won't name it, but it rhymes with furnace sota. Adam Stoker: Is it skin-a-sota? It might be skin-a-sota. I'll have to go back to the state. Leif Pettersen: I don't want to out them, but if you look at their recent campaign, with the exception, I think, of one video that I actually quite like, the rest of them are just like, "Where is this? This could be anywhere." It could be Nebraska, it could be Alaska, it could be Finland or it could be Minnesota, you don't know. Adam Stoker: Well, you're touching on a problem though that I think a lot of our listeners have and that is there are so many stakeholders and hands on the pot saying, "We want you to do it this way. We want you to feature us." And there's restaurants that want to be featured and there's hot Springs, there's so many different things within a destination. They become these collages, a video collage of everything you could possibly do. When in fact, there's only one or two things in most destinations that makes them completely unique. To your point, you've got to focus on what makes your destination unique. Then once they get there, focus on disbursing that traffic throughout the destination so that the people who came for one thing, have the opportunity to experience the other components of a destination, right? Leif Pettersen: Exactly. That brings me back to Mall of America. Now, the Mall of America is not for everyone, but it does bring in over 40 million visitors a year. A lot of them are from out of state and international travelers. It breaks my heart, but some people, yes, they come in, they visit the mall, they go shopping, and then they go home. That makes me want to tear what little hair I have out of my head. A lot of those people, they stay, they come into Minneapolis and St Paul, they'll go to Northern Minnesota to the boundary waters, they'll do other stuff. Mall of America was the weird gargantuan thing that brought them here, but then the ones that actually have an interest in something other than shopping spill out and see the rest of the state. Your opinions about shopping malls, not-withstanding, that has been a huge boom for Minnesota tourism. Adam Stoker: Leif, it's been great to have you, you've given us some great insight here today, especially for people struggling to understand how to tell their story and stand out from the crowd. I think there's so much value in that. A lot of the things that you've told us today will benefit our audience. So thanks. Leif Pettersen: My pleasure. You can't stop me from talking about this, as you've seen. It's a topic I'm still very attached to because I find it exciting. Tourism is one of the few things that, whatever it is, if it's a cruise ship, if it's a mall, if it's canoeing in the boundary waters, whatever's making people happy, that's the most important thing. You're trying to make people happy. I think tourism is extremely important because we all need that recharge. One way or another, we've got to make sure that there's some sort of outlet for people to step away from their lives, do something super fun, awesome, whatever, that makes them happy and then come home recharged. Adam Stoker: Yeah. What a gratifying industry to be in, right? Leif Pettersen: It is. Adam Stoker: Everyone, this has been another episode of the Destination Marketing podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in. A reminder to go in, we've had several new people join the LinkedIn group, Destination Marketers, go join, share your knowledge. We had a new video posted yesterday that had some great information about social media and tactics that you can use there. Let's continue to grow together and learn together. Go request to join Destination Marketers on LinkedIn, and other than that, and we'll talk to you next week.
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