Stuart Butler: [00:00:01] We have to change if we don't, that's not going to be good for us as DMOs. If we're putting all our eggs in the paid media basket. So, what we're doing and what I encourage all DMOs to do is shift gradually and responsibly over time A portion of your dollars from paid media to owned media.
Adam Stoker: [00:00:20] Hello, everyone and welcome to another episode of the Destination Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Stoker and boy do we have a fun show and series of shows for you. Before we dive in, though, I want to make sure that if you're not already following us on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube or TikTok, you're missing out on most of them. It's @destination_pod or you can just search Destination Marketing Podcast.
Also, if you are enjoying the show, please make sure to leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps us continue to grow the show. Spotify as well is a great place to leave us a rating or a review. All right, let's get into what we are doing on the Destination Marketing Podcast for the next few weeks because honestly, it's been a treat for me to prepare this. It's something that I've been working on now for a very long time well into last year and it's so fun to see it start to come to fruition.
Stuart Butler, who's the chief marketing officer from Visit Myrtle Beach and I are both very, very passionate about the value of owned media for tourism destinations. In fact, we've been working on coauthoring a book together and that book is getting close to being published. And in preparation for the release of that book, I wanted to do a, a miniseries on the show where we're taking most of the concepts that we discussed in the book and we've broken it up into several episodes where we can walk you through how to build an owned media strategy and why it's important for your destination.
I can't wait for you to hear the discussion. It's going to be a series of several episodes and you'll be able to kind of hear from start to finish why you need an owned media strategy, how to create an owned media strategy and what the impact is going to be on your destination. You're going to love it. I loved putting it together and I can't wait to get your feedback on what you think. Thanks, everybody. Enjoy the listen.
There's a whole lot that I want to cover. But I think to start, I think we need to set the stage with kind of the current state of the destination marketing industry. I think there's a lot going on in the industry but there's kind of an issue industrywide where I feel like for some reason, the tourism industry has a tendency to lag behind some other industries as far as change, innovation and things like that. And as I look at the tourism industry, I can look at the ads all over and I'm going to use the United States for the sake of this discussion, but all over the United States and you could change out a logo and some copy and any ad could be for any destination.
I feel like there is something's got to give because we're all using the same tactics, we're all doing the same things, using the same media, using the same creative and expecting people to choose between one destination and another when in fact, there's not a whole lot of difference from a marketing standpoint. Is that fair to say, Stuart?
Stuart Butler: [00:03:24] Yeah, 100%. And, and I think it's important to sort of step back. I can ask the question, why is that the case? What led us to this, this point? Because I don't think it's always been the case. I think if you look back historically there was some innovation, even back to when DMOs were first created in Chicago. And it was really just a consortium of local businesses that realized there was value in groups visiting Chicago and saying, hey, we should do something to coalesce our efforts and coop our resources together to promote the destination.
So, it's been innovation and then you look throughout history, obviously, there's standout campaigns like I Love New York that resonated throughout the world, right? Not just the US. And so in my mind, having only been in this industry for a couple of years, I'd say there were a couple of observations that happened when I first arrived and I came from the hotel space sort of the sister industry sort of adjacent. Prior to that, I was in the online retail space and I always felt like when I moved from online retail to hotels, there was probably a five-year time warp, we jumped back in time five years in terms of technology and approach. I felt like when I went from hotels to DMOS, I felt that it was the same, there was another five-year-jump.
So in that comparison, we're 10 years behind who I would consider at the forefront, which is primarily e-commerce and they have a massive advantage because the amount of data they can capture the number of customers they have on a repeat basis is significant and so they can iterate more rapidly than say a destination that only gets someone once a year or once in a lifetime.
I think the reason behind why we are here is twofold. I think one, it's to do with there's a lot of people that have been in this industry for a long time. Right? A very long time. There's lifers that have only done this industry. And so they've been in this echo chamber their entire career. You sort of hang out with the same people and do the same things, you start sounding and looking a lot the same and you continue to do the same thing.
I think the bigger more impactful reason is our funding mechanism, right? I think if you look at where our funding sources come from, it's all a little different, but for the most part, it's coming from taxpayer's dollars in some formal fashion, right? And so there's a lot of scrutiny, there's a lot of restrictions, there's a lot of stakeholders that are investing that want and expect to see certain things. And so when people try to innovate that by definition means they're taking risks. And when you take risks, there's a chance that things don't work out and then you get scrutiny from the stakeholders, then your job becomes under fire.
You can see that to the extreme case what happened in Florida. Right? Where Visit Florida got defunded for a little while because of some decisions around innovative risky campaigns and you could debate the merits of those campaigns. But the end of the day, it was a calculated risk that some people at the legislative level didn't like. And therefore they yanked all the funding and that's an oversimplification. But that's the reason I think that we're where we are.
Adam Stoker: [00:06:38] You know, Stuart you bring up the funding model. And I think that's an interesting point because beyond what you mentioned I also feel like this is one of the only situations where the funding model doesn't necessarily match the consumer demand. What I mean by that is that hotels are the ones or lodging tax if I want to get technical is what actually funds most DMO activities, but what the DMO is marketing is a holistic visitor experience, right, and what the consumers want is a complete visitor experience. They're not just looking for a hotel.
And so in some cases, the funding model is not necessarily conducive to the actual goals of the DMO. So I think that's another thing that might lead to some of the lag maybe and innovation is that I know that hotel partners' primary goal is to get heads and beds is to fill their rooms. For the most part that aligns with the DMO goal, but the DMO’s goal of marketing the entire visitor experience in some cases probably results in these stakeholders being resistant to some of that holistic marketing activity because you can't tie it directly to the heads and beds.
I think it creates another barrier that destinations have to overcome if they want to innovate and do some sort of new type of marketing, especially if it doesn't immediately reflect heads and beds.
Stuart Butler: [00:08:09] Yeah, 100%. There's a subset of DMOs and we're one of those that has to be really clever in how we monetize operations like some DMOs including ours the bed tax can be used for things like media placement in building assets, but it cannot be used for operations. It's very restricted in usage and so we have to, in our case, create unrestricted funding sources to fund salaries and everyday operations of the business.
What that's done in addition to what you're talking about is, yes, there's a lot of scrutiny from accommodations, but when you're going back to the same accommodations that are already driving this tax revenue and saying we need you invest your own private dollars into our organization as well so that we can operate, that leads to an exacerbated version of what you're describing because now they're looking at that as a marketing investment, which they're now expecting an ROI, which creates this pressure on a DMO to not necessarily focus on their core business which is to drive incremental new visitors to the destination. It tends to warp the focus towards bottom-of-funnel conversions so that you can drive ROI directly in last-click analytics to a hotel booking.
At the end of the day, you touched on this, but it's worth reiterating, people aren't going to destinations because of the hotels for the most part. There's clearly exceptions, places like Great Wolf Lodge that are a destination in and of themselves. Margaritaville might be another example of that. But for the most part, you're going to the destination for either an experience or an event or an attraction, something like that. You have to stay in a hotel, but it's not what we call gravity that attracts someone to the destination in the first place.
So if the DMOs are so focused on the hotels and make placating them, making them happy, they neglect talking about the things that really attract people to the destination and therefore they're really not serving the community best because they're not driving awareness and incremental new visitation.
Adam Stoker: [00:10:19] I think that's a great point. You mentioned last-click attribution model and I think it's important for us for the audience to define what that is. Last click attribution is when you attribute the success of your advertising to the very last engagement prior to the booking or purchase or whatever. So, in a lot of cases, in fact, I feel like in the early days of the -- I'll call it the digital revolution when everybody realized just how valuable Google Search results were, and so many people kind of flocked to paid search and SEO as tactics that were going to be really important. Google actually got an inflated share of the credit for the actual booking that was taking place because we were looking at what was the last activity that drove the action.
But if you really want to understand attribution for advertising, you have to take a step back and say, okay, well, there's a marketing funnel or there's a buyer journey and we're assigning all of the credit to the very last step in that buyer journey prior to a purchase. When in reality, there was first the branding that was interacted with and there was probably some sort of media consumption, whether that was an ad or something else that led to the consideration between one destination or another or one product or another. Then ultimately the choice was made to make a purchase or book a trip.
That attribution model of last click is flawed because it doesn't tell the entire story. I would say that you need to have a picture of the full visitor or buyer journey in order to create an attribution model and you can't create it just off last click alone or you're only going to be looking at a small portion of what led to the actual purchase.
Stuart Butler: [00:12:16] Yeah. And I do feel like last-click attribution is a viable tool to analyze certain things, right? It should be one lens through which you look at your campaigns. But to your point, you need to be looking using multiple models at what's going on and really understanding what you touched on the customer journey from beginning to end and it's not a linear path and it's not the same for every consumer. They're touching a lot of different channels, mediums, campaigns along the way and understanding how all of those play their little part is really the way that you can understand what's working, what's not and then optimize and improve in subsequent campaigns.
Adam Stoker: [00:12:56] Absolutely. So we've talked about some of the challenges that exist in the industry right now and we touched on the buyer journey. I think one of the issues in measuring the buyer journey is trying to understand what's happened every step of the way when in the tourism industry the data that you would normally get, let's say in an e-commerce company or something like that, is completely different. And Stuart you touched on the availability of data. The problem is we know very little about the visitor journey because we can't track every step along the way like other industries can.
And because of that lack of data, I think it's also created a situation where destinations have a tendency to err on the side of the low-hanging fruit, the things that we do have the ability to get to the data for. Sometimes we're not seeing the forest for the trees and we're only focused on the measurable tactics which don't actually, for example, brochure downloads don't actually result in a visit.
Stuart Butler: [00:14:01] Yeah. And this is a deep conversation here because this is also one of the other challenges. We only see a very limited piece of the window currently on mass, right? There are some people that are further ahead than others. I think that the more savvy DMOs are on a path toward trying to understand and collect data throughout the entire journey.
Currently, most DMOs can see the following and they can see when they spend money on a third party, maybe that's Google or Facebook or Expedia or it doesn't matter where it is, I know how many impressions I'm getting. I know how many clicks that yields to my website, right? Then my website maybe has a lot of different content and also has listings for my members or the attractions and the hotels and all the different businesses in my destination.
The current moment the majority of DMO is once that consumer leaves my ecosystem, my website and clicks off to a member site, I've lost them. I don't know what they do and I have no way to tell what happened, whether they transacted, whether they showed up. Now, there are third-party tools like Arrivalist and others that are beginning to bridge that gap and show me how campaigns impact arrivals and they're doing a great job. But I think a DMO is imperative over the next decade is to get further down in the value chain, not necessarily to deal with the transactions, but to make sure you're partnering with the folks who are controlling the transactions both online and off to better understand what happens with the traffic you send them.
We've done that through various partners and there's a myriad of ways you can do it, but it starts by building trust and being more collaborative with the membership or with the stakeholders in your destination, showing them the value of sharing and collaborating with data in an anonymous way that is not going to be competitive to them. But in a way that raises your ability to target the right customer at the right time on the right channel, the right media so that you're driving better quality visitation to your destination. It is a massive undertaking and it takes time, but it is something that I think all DMOs should be putting significant resources towards.
Adam Stoker: [00:16:12] I think you're absolutely right. I think the other thing that as far as we're still on kind of state of the industry, right? Another thing that I think is happening as you look at the state of the industry is because we can't see the window into the entire buyer journey. It’s difficult for us to do things that are more of a long-term play because a lot of stakeholders want the immediate data, right? And so we talked about last click and the flaws with last click. It's very difficult to have a long-term view when in reality, you're judged on an annual basis based on last click.
So what that also results in is somewhat of a shortsighted marketing strategy where we're focused on getting the lowest hanging fruit, getting those visitors that are ready to book now and trying to get those results now. On an annual basis, we can show that with our strategy we're generating these bookings. But what we really have a hard time tracking is over time did we widen the audience? Did we go beyond the current audience set?
One of the things as far as the industry goes, there's a big push right now for DEI. With DEI, one of the encouragements is expand your audience. If you have one audience, one type of people that comes to your destination, let's expand that audience, right? But the danger of that is we're all judged on immediate results and because we're all judged on immediate results, taking a risk like that to spend money to target an audience that you don't currently have and you're going to be judged on the success or failure of that campaign at the end of the year, makes it very difficult to do those types of initiatives that will result in true audience expansion.
And, so, I don't know, as I think about that I think that one of the challenges that we have as an industry is the incentives don't necessarily meet what the industry actually needs.
Stuart Butler: [00:18:18] And part of that is because the tail is wagging the dog in terms of the stakeholders, a lot of times are dictating to the DMOs what's important and it should be the other way around. What I mean by that is they want to see vanity metrics that really don't mean anything at the end of the day to the destination, but make them feel like the people that are spending the money on their behalf are doing a good job, right? Because at the end of the day, DMOs are not spending DMOs money, DMOs are spending the community's money. That's the way I look it and that's the way every DMO should. So we should absolutely be good stewards of that money.
But reporting out on a monthly basis, things like impressions and clicks and these vanity metrics that mean nothing to your destination’s health, the quality of life for your residents and your businesses is asinine and it gets you caught up in this short-term thinking. DMO should be switching towards looking at longer-term metrics around the quality of life for local residents like surveying local resident sentiment, surveying the businesses. They should also be looking at real data that actually matters like tax collection, average length of stay. If you're a seasonal destination, they should be looking at how you are impacting the amount of travelers in the spend in the offseason. They should be looking at sentiment analysis, comparing your destination to others. What is the perceived brand level for different categories and different aspects related to your destination?
Like these are meaningful things that actually impact the bottom line of businesses, clicks, impressions, views, these things don't you can't put any of that in the bank. The only thing you can put in the bank is money and the only way we can measure that is by looking at the full circle of that consumer journey, looking at things like lifetime value. Are these people coming back? Are they spending more when they come back? Are we as a DMO educating them to maximize their investment when they're in-destination to get more value but meanwhile also spend more money while they’re here?
Those are the things that we should be looking at and talking to our stakeholders and pushing out to our stakeholders because it'll get us away from the short-term thinking and get us focused on the long-term goals and objectives.
Adam Stoker: [00:20:31] So Stuart, I want to double-click on what you just said because this is actually what I see as one of the major almost impasses in the industry is because DMOs don't have the data, it's difficult to tell the strategic story. You refer to it as the tail wagging the dog, right? Yet in order to be able to do some of these long-term things to actually have a strategy that matches the consumer demand, a destination has to position itself as the ultimate strategic resource in the destination and having a very sound strategy that justifies not just looking at these vanity metrics like you mentioned, that justifies having a long term view, but because destinations don't have the data the paradox is that it's very difficult for them to tell that story.
So how does a destination start? Like because in order to do what we're going to talk about in this book, destinations first have to get the trust of their community. How do you tell the story effectively and communicate your strategy effectively in such a way that the community is going to give you a longer leash than just the monthly heads and beds tax evaluation that you're getting now industry-wide?
Stuart Butler: [00:21:47] Engagement is the word. A lot of DMOs make the mistake of sharing information without engaging with their stakeholders. There's an old saying it was shared with me by Stuart Collivan MMGY. But I don't think he coined the term, but I love it a lot. He said, when you share people will criticize. When you engage, they'll defend. I don't know who originated that quote, but it's really true when it comes to the DMO world.
What we're in the habit of sharing information and then obviously there's going to be criticism and a reaction. But if we walk hand in hand and to engage all of our stakeholders, our municipalities, our counties, our state legislators, our businesses, our local residents, these are our different stakeholders that we're serving. We're here to serve those people and we're investing their money back into their pockets, right? That's ultimately what we're doing.
So engaging with them. That starts by listening, it starts by bringing them to the table. I think DMOs are more positioned to be a lot of people right now are talking about DMMOs Destination Management Marketing Organizations. I don't think that's the right term. I know some folks are using Destination Stewardship and I think that's closer. I think it's already implied in our marketing mandate, like being a destination marketing organization. I think if you look back to one of marketing, the product is one of the P’s of marketing, right?
It's on us to ensure that we're curating a great product and the product is made up of all these stakeholders. So our job to me is to convene it's to facilitate the conversations behind these between these stakeholders and power brokers so that we understand. Like let’s listen first, let's listen to what people want. Let's try to create a vision for the future of our destination. Then let's put a long-term plan in place. If we have a plan, we're all working towards that. We all grow in the same direction and all the energy will go in that same direction.
Once we've engaged people and listened and shared and everyone's brought in on that same vision, then you can start to create what I would consider a universal scorecard, something that the entire team across all these stakeholders can get behind and look at and agree that this is success and this is failure. That's the key. If you can get that alignment, then your job is a lot easier because you're no longer looking in the rearview mirror and looking over your shoulder and worried that someone's going to take your job or you're going to get defunded because now you're integral to the mission that everyone, all these stakeholders agree to. And you're all, like I said, rowing in the same direction.
Adam Stoker: [00:24:30] So if I was to rephrase what you're saying then a little bit. It's destinations who haven't done the work on the front end to engage and generate alignment with their stakeholders are not going to be able to pull this off.
Stuart Butler: [00:24:45] 100% not.
Adam Stoker: [00:24:47] Yeah, to take a long-term strategy like this when you've got people questioning the value you're bringing on an annual basis, you're just not going to be able to do something like this. So I think step one to your point is to first of all engage and align with your stakeholders, earn their trust and then take this long-term view that we're going to discuss in our book here.
Stuart Butler: [00:25:12] Yeah. And then what you'll find is the step two of that, which is beginning to understand that once you're building out this school universal scorecard, understanding what data points you're going to need to pull that off, you'll find it's a lot easier to get to that data without spending a ton of money if you have alignment between the stakeholders. I got to give you an example.
If I wanted to know, for example, is the average length of stay for my destination increasing over time, I could go spend $100,000 a year plus to buy some kind of report that does that for me, right? Or I could work collaboratively with my local accommodations to provide that data for me for free and anonymized, right? They have that data, it's in their PMS. All we've got to do is get either manually get them to export that as a CSP or set up some kind of feed very inexpensively. Then all you need is someone smart enough and data-driven to analyze that and push that out as a single metric every month or every quarter or whatever it is.
So you don't have to spend a ton of money to do this, but you won't get the buy-in from the stakeholders, especially these accommodations. They're not going to share data with you unless you're in alignment and you're on the same team.
Adam Stoker: [00:26:26] Well, and then they want to play their cards close to the chest unless they understand how their data is going to help your overall strategy and in return help them. And so that's the story you've got craft, right?
Stuart Butler: [00:26:40] Right. And that's exactly that's how you approach it. You're helping them by bringing together multiple stakeholders into the same conversation. You have to sell everything on the value to them not the value to the DMO. The DMO is a to the community. So this isn't something that benefits the DMO. It's something that benefits the community.
Adam Stoker: [00:27:00] Well, it's a little bit hilarious because you started with the history of how DMOs came together, right? A group of organizations that understood if they pulled their dollars together they could accomplish more than they could individually. Where we just landed was, well, we're going to have to show them that if their dollars work together, it's going to benefit them individually. It's almost like, yes, that's the whole reason they all came together. But however many years later, we still haven't figured it out.
Stuart Butler: [00:27:26] Yeah, because I think there's been this massive power struggle over the last couple of decades and I understand why it's happened, but I don't think it's healthy for the communities. I mean, you see it in the fact that 10 years ago how many DMOs were also chambers of commerce? But most of them are split, right? And most of them now, I think only 3% of DMOs are also chambers. We happen to be one of them. I think it's a massive advantage for us. I couldn't imagine being competitive for membership dollars, for attention, for influence for all the things that we value. I couldn't imagine having to compete with a powerful entity like that in our destination.
I think we've done ourselves a disservice because today people crave power and they crave control. So we created in my mind at least we've created this environment where it's really hard to build consensus because the power brokers in a lot of destinations aren't in alignment, creating an organization that's maybe even separate from the DMO that brings all of these power brokers to the table and is an oversight committee that kind of guides everyone is potentially a good start for a lot of destinations. I know that there are destinations that have had a lot of success taking that approach.
Adam Stoker: [00:28:40] Yeah. Well, I think this is a good place for us to kind of wrap up prior to diving into the principles we're going to talk about here, the state of the industry, which is that I think the industry has really struggled to have a long term view because of the barriers that we've identified here in our conversation. Because of that, it's been very risky for people to have a strategy that expands beyond the short term because they're measured in the short term. It's resulted in a lot of challenges industry-wide and maybe a somewhat of a lack of innovation as a result. Stuart, I think we probably ought to establish why people ought to give a crap what you and I have to say and so maybe we could each take a moment and go through our journey that led us to be able to speak on this topic and I'd love to start with you if you're okay with that.
Stuart Butler: [00:29:35] Yeah, I'd be happy to. So my background is unconventional I would say getting to this place. I don't think I ever thought when I was in high school or college that I would end up in the seat. But I went to college for physics with space science and systems. So my classical training was essentially rocket science. I always wanted to go work for NASA. I was always fascinated with the unknown and I thought what better unknown was that in space.
It sort of led me to a weird place because I was doing a project in my 3rd year in that degree where I had to learn programming coding. This was like in the mid-’90s and the internet was sort of just a thing and colleges were obviously early adopters of the internet. And my professor showed me search engine for this first time and immediately understood when I saw that, that I could learn anything I wanted to ever know right there, like in anything. It was going to fundamentally change, how we consumed, how we learned, how we communicated. I didn't quite envision how it was going to go the way it did with social media. Like that wasn't a thing at the time. But I became really fascinated with how the internet worked and what it was going to do.
So I finished my physics degree and went back to school and got a computer science degree so I could be a part of that. That led me into the agency world in hotels and online retail. I started out my life as a programmer building booking engine technology for hotels and e-commerce stores for online retail. Really became fascinated with how that worked looking at the data, looking at the psychology of it. The company I worked for at the time, we over the course of the 20 years I was there went from 11 people to selling for several million dollars to a large publicly traded company.
We sort of figured it out as we went along, we were very scrappy and innovative and always tried to be cutting edge and always try to pay attention to two things. One is, and this is Jeff Bezos's approach. Try to figure out what's not going to change. What are the things that are consistent and always going to be the same? But then at the same time paying attention to what is changing and how do those two things meet. We found ourselves after I've been there about 10 or 15 years doing pretty well for ourselves, but very regional and we wanted to be bigger, we wanted to be national, international.
I stumbled across this concept that I know you've coined the term branded entertainment. At the time I called it valued media. But I was beginning to see the big media, big companies, big brands were creating content that wasn't directly selling the product. It was more educating or entertaining to people. So we sort of rolled the dice and took a stab into that. This is how inexpensive it can be to start on this journey. What we did is we literally spent $80 and bought a Yeti microphone and put it in the middle of a round table and four of us just sat around. We had some loose show notes, but it was really more of a conversation. We wanted it to be a campfire kind of feel where the audience was a part of the conversation.
We just started recording and we published it without really promoting it. We didn't have budget to spend a whole lot on paid media and the paid media we were doing was really promoting the business, not promoting the content. So organically, we just decided to try it for a few weeks and see what happened. the first episode initially got like 50 or 80 downloads and then we did a second episode and it was like 90 and then the next one was like 100. We were seeing this consistent growth, and it was encouraging and so we continued it and we got to about 10 episodes in or so.
We said, all right, this is getting some traction. Let's spend a little bit more money. So we went back and spent a whopping $400 and bought some better microphones and a mixing desk. So we each could have our own microphone and improve the quality of the audio. But that was really it. Then we fast forward four or five years into that project we were getting thousands and thousands of downloads every episode. It became our most valuable tool. It was the biggest lead generator, like almost every lead that we had come in sales lead was someone saying we heard this episode of the podcast or we've been listening to the podcast for years and we want to learn more.
It really cut down our sales cycle too because we were educating people on how we thought. And so we didn't have to go through the dog and pony show one establishing authority into teaching them what, how we do things. It became our only form of promotion. It took us really from a regional agency to an international agency and positioned us to sell in a pretty good deal.
I can't talk enough positive about that experience. It really pushed me into this direction of thinking about content as king and how we can leverage that in this new career as a DMO. We never lost sight of a couple of things. One, we always knew that we had to be providing value to the audience, but we also knew that the audience were very discerning and that they had the opportunity to consume any content they wanted. So we had to not just compete with other hotel podcasts, which there weren't many initially, but by the end, there was a lot. But we also had to compete with entertainment podcasts, we had to compete with This American Life and My Favorite Murder and Radio Lab and all these other crime shows that are so popular on the charts. So we had to make sure that people wanted to tune in.
So every episode, they knew they were going to get two things, they were going to learn something and they were going to laugh, they were going to find something humorous along the way. We kept those two things forefront as we developed it. And it was really, really successful for us.
Adam Stoker: [00:35:28] Great and maybe walk us through the transition from there to Myrtle Beach and where you are today.
Stuart Butler: [00:35:34] Yeah. So the DMO world has really been a learning curve for me in a lot of ways. Probably the biggest one was figuring out how to build consensus through engagement, like how to get people on board with this philosophy because it's different, right? I think later in the book we'll talk about what the framework is that makes this make sense now for DMOs. But I spent a lot of time educating people like the board members and other staff members and city leaders and telling them about why this makes sense for them and how this kind of an investment is going to pay dividends long term.
So it started with investment. But when I came in I borrowed this term from a good friend of mine. His name is Tim Peter. He's a digital consultant and he's got a unique background. He's taken a lot of different things from analog to digital. But starting out in the music industry, he took his company from an analog music producer to a digital. He's done it with hotels and other industries. He has a saying that I love. He says, “Content is king. The customer experience is queen and data is the crown jewels.” Those three things are the cornerstone of any good marketing program content, the customer experience in the data.
That's the kind of framework that we set everything up through. We knew that from a content perspective, most DMOs to your point earlier are creating very generic things that every video that I've seen that every conference I've been in the industry where someone is showcasing their destination is essentially the same thing. It's the same beauty shots of the location, it's the same people smiling, like a diverse array of people, smiling and eating and doing fun things. Then some kind of tagline that basically says we're great and everyone will love us, right? That's what every video is. Every ad.
So how do we break away from that? How do we actually get attention? I think it's branded entertainment. I think what we need to do is start to build audiences. We are on a journey, we've just completed 2022 was our first full year with this what we're calling our branded entertainment beach easy media. We launched a TV show, podcast, YouTube channels, children's book that's about to launch. So we did a lot and now phase 2, we're doubling down on that. We're creating a lot more content. At The Core is the same thing we did at my agency is we want it to be entertaining first, we want to build an audience first. That's the most important thing was sell Myrtle Beach second.
Now, Myrtle Beach has to be prevalent in all of it because we obviously have to justify our expenses legally and to the stakeholders that are paying attention. But we definitely know that if we build the audience first and provide value, we can do the second part pretty easily.
Adam Stoker: [00:38:28] Yeah, we'll get into the methodology of that I think later on in our discussion as well.
Stuart Butler: [00:38:35] And the rationale too, there's some, there's some fundamental understandings that need to happen in order to get people to where they can buy in.
Adam Stoker: [00:38:42] Yeah. Absolutely. Well, now I'm going to bore you with my journey. So, I'll kind of start with the fact that I actually stumbled into advertising. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do when I was in college, but I knew I was dating this woman that I knew I couldn't live without and asked her to marry me and she said, you better figure out what you're going to do with your life first. It just so happened I was taking the intro to advertising class at the time and really enjoyed it. I said, well, this is as good a thing as any to do here and told her I was committed and luckily that led to me marrying her.
That I chose advertising and really fell in love with it from the beginning. I graduated in 2009 from BYU and advertising, which may have been one of the worst times to ever graduate in advertising from college. It was just in the middle of what they refer to as the great recession. I went to advertising agency after advertising agency, putting in my application. There weren't any job openings. It was all here in Utah. Finally got somebody to give me an internship. It was a $ 10-an-hour internship. I had a year and a half of professional experience and thought I was above an internship. But one of the best decisions I ever made was taking the internship as opposed to a job that would have forced me to leave the advertising industry because I did have several options like that. But I was passionate enough about it to stick with it.
After a year and a half at that internship, I basically learned the nuts and bolts of how it all works, how an agency works. I was able to go from the experience that you gain in school that you think is enough to do your job. Then actually go through the actual job and realize how much I came out of school not knowing and put those building blocks together. Got a job at a little agency. So I guess I should say the agency I was at was like 300 people or something like that. And I went to an agency of 3 people. It was in Saint George Utah, which is not exactly an advertising town but just felt like it was the right opportunity.
My job was to bring in new clients and then build infrastructure underneath me to support those clients and manage those clients. Really, I took what I had learned from that big agency and tried to apply it at this small agency that I was working at. Over the first couple of years, I brought in some really cool and unique clients and it was off of just weird methods. The biggest client we ever brought in, I actually drove by one of their trucks on the road and thought their logo was ugly and I called them and said, “Hey, I think you guys need help with your marketing.” And they are actually still spending millions of dollars per year with us on an annual basis, which is amazing, just from driving by the truck on the road.
One of the organizations that I walked into, I was driving in Cedar City, Utah, I had been at a client meeting and I saw this sign on a building and I thought, well, they look like they might have an advertising budget. I walked in and it was the Cedar City Tourism Bureau. I didn't know anything about tourism. I had no idea what they did. But I walked in and said, “Hey, would you guys be interested in getting help from an advertising agency?” And they said, “As a matter of fact, we would.” That led to an eight-year engagement with our first DMO. And as soon as we got into the world, we were hooked. Referral after referral after referral. Next thing you knew tourism was 40% of our business.
In 2016, I had the opportunity to buy that business that was called Sorenson Advertising and rebrand that business from Sorenson Advertising to Relic. At that point, we decided we wanted to go all in on tourism. At the time, we didn't think there was very much competition in tourism. And boy, were we in for a surprise at just how much competition there was in tourism. As we tried to pivot that direction, we did a really good job of expanding in Utah but had a difficult time expanding beyond Utah. We would be a finalist on an RFP. In fact, I remember flying out to be a finalist on several RFPs and the other agency was the local flavor, right? The agency down the road that was going to be easy for them to hire. And we lost out to that agency on a consistent basis.
Finally, I was kind of like, you know, I need somewhere where people can know and have a frame of reference that we know what we're talking about in tourism because it's not as easy as it sounds. It took us a long time to really figure out the industry and get up to speed. So I thought, you know what? I think the best way to do this is start a podcast and then send the people that were pitching to the podcast to listen and know that we know what we're talking about.
I didn't know anything about podcasts other than the fact that I really like to listen to some sports podcasts. I had consumed the gateway drug of pop podcasts, which is True Crime. And so from that point, I hadn't really had much experience outside of that with podcasting. But I just thought, let's give it a try and Stuart you mentioned how inexpensive it is to get started. I mean we didn't have anything, we just got a mic and started recording just like you did. Next thing you know we hadn't done anything to promote it and the listenership grew and grew and grew. It's like holy cow, we might be on to something.
I always enjoy telling this part of the story because I get such a kick out of it. But when I would reach out to somebody on LinkedIn and say, hey, would you like to talk about your marketing? I would probably get like a 2% response rate for those LinkedIn outreach emails. But when I would send an email and say, hey, would you like to come talk about yourself in your destination and what you're doing in your destination for 30 minutes? I got like a 60% response rate.
So I was able to start building these relationships a lot faster and a lot more in-depth than I had ever been able to without the podcast. That was in 2019. Now we'll hit 80,000 listens in January of this year on my podcast. I believe there's only 10,000 or so destination marketing professionals in the United States. So our market penetration on that podcast is amazing. I really think the reason for that is for one, I bring on really smart people to my show and they talk about the strategy that they're doing in their destination. But two, we try to give every listener something implementable from the show every time.
So instead of the trade show format where you get really inspired but have no idea what to do next, the Tony Robbins style discussion, instead let's get really specific, let's talk strategy and give people something that they can implement. So my podcast has grown from zero to one of the if not the leading podcast in the tourism industry and has generated speaking opportunities for me all over the country, has generated this opportunity with Myrtle Beach that really we're taking this philosophy of owned media and doubling down on it.
After doing this podcast for a couple of years, I started having destinations ask me if I could help them start podcasts. My original response to that was we're an ad agency that's not really what we do. After enough requests, it's like, man, we probably ought to give this a try. So in March of 2020, we had five destinations lined up and ready to go. Of course, COVID hit right as we were about to launch those five podcasts. Beaufort, South Carolina, Robb Wells at Beaufort, South Carolina decided to see it through when all the other destinations had dropped off and decided to go ahead and launch his podcast and they're our longest-standing podcast.
We really were able to kind of figure out the model for a basic destination podcast, especially for a small destination. We started out doing podcasts for several destinations. I think we've got around 20 or so that we're managing now and growing every month. As we were doing these podcasts, my vision expanded from every destination needs a podcast to every destination needs to be caring for and nurturing their own media channels so that they can build an engaged and active audience.
That's where the conversation between Stuart and I kind of took off is because it aligned really well with Stuart’s hypothesis of branded entertainment taking what he had learned at Fuel implementing it here at Myrtle Beach. And we realized, hey, we might as well do this thing together.
Stuart Butler: [00:47:53] Yeah. That would never have happened were it not for your podcast. I found you when I came to the industry. The first thing I did when I knew I was going to take this job was I started searching in Apple Podcasts for DMO podcasts and yours came up number one. So kudos to you when I typed in. I don't remember it was probably Destination Marketing Podcast is what I typed in, right? Which is pretty good because you have that locked down in terms of your brand name.
But I found you, I found Bill Geist, I found a couple of others, but you stood out because of what you were saying in that it was valuable. It wasn't just pontificating and talking hypotheticals. It was valuable because it was tactical, as well as strategic, right? It gave me things that I could actually think about out but also implement. That was the success we had with Fuel too because it was always something tangibly valuable in every episode that someone could take and apply.
So I don't even remember to be honest, Adam, if I reached out to you first or you reached out to me, I don't remember who made the first connection.
Adam Stoker: [00:48:57] So it was actually, it was me reaching out to you because I was bringing my family to Myrtle Beach on vacation and I wanted to see -- yeah, I wanted to see if you could maybe give me some ideas. And you're like, “Hey, I've actually heard your podcast.”
Stuart Butler: [00:49:10] Yeah, that's right. And so we struck up a conversation and then a friendship and I think we're very like-minded in how we approach things. I think both of us, you listen to our background we're both very scrappy and innovative. We both sort of learned a lot of this as we went along and we're always willing to challenge the status quo. We're always willing to take a risk. We're willing to roll up our sleeves. Like I literally remember the day when we said, yeah, we're going to do this podcast thing. And I went ahead and blocked a time on my calendar for every Friday afternoon because that's when we did it. And I just went on Google and I started searching for simple things. Like, how do you create a podcast? What equipment do you use? How do you publish it? Where do you publish it?
And within like three or four hours of just simple Google research I would say I knew more than 85% of people about how to publish a podcast, right? Because it's intimidating and most people don't get past the initial thought. They don't take the time and it doesn't take long and that goes full circle back to what I love the internet, right? Because you can literally learn how to do this stuff on your own without spending any money just by doing a few searches or connecting with the right few people. That's really what we want this book to be about is how do we help DMOs capitalize on that value that's out there? How do we help them take that plunge from thinking about this stuff to actually executing this stuff, whether you're a big DMO like Myrtle Beach or whether you're a tiny little DMO with very little to no boxing budget?
You can do this, you can follow this path and we've proven that it worked. So I hope that we inspire a few other DMOs to take a bold step forward through the rest of this book.
Adam Stoker: [00:50:51] Yeah, I think the other component of this Stuart is that you and I both tripped and stumbled and trial and error and made our way to where we are today. I think what we've developed is that now that we learned the bits and pieces and the building blocks of this concept, we've now gotten to the point where we can zoom out and instead of letting someone else do a five-year journey of tripping and falling and trying to figure out how to get here, we've got a philosophy, strategy and methodology that will allow others to get to where we are much quicker than we were able to by combining our two journeys and experiences and philosophies together.
Stuart Butler: [00:51:33] Yeah, 100%. There was many sleepless nights and blood and sweat and tears that went into getting to where we are. So yeah, we paid the tuition now you guys can benefit from the education.
Adam Stoker: [00:51:45] Great Stuart, I think as far as our conversation today, why don't we wrap up with why I take a gamble like you're taking at a destination like Myrtle Beach that has so many visitors that has a significant budget and has the ability to hide in plain sight, for lack of a better description because you're going to get visitors to Myrtle Beach, almost regardless of what you do, and please don't take that the wrong way, but because of the quality of your product, you could easily hide in plain sight. But instead, you're taking a significant risk and you're going in on this owned media philosophy. Why do this at Myrtle Beach?
Stuart Butler: [00:52:24] Yeah. Well, you're right 100%. People will come to Myrtle Beach whether we promote or not. Will as many people come? I mean, if you believe in the power of advertising, you would assume not. Right? And will people spend as much stay as long, book as early? Those are the things that matter to me. Will they stay in the offseason? Will they tell their friends about us, doing the things that make, make us more successful, make our community more successful, make the quality of life for residents better?
I think the bigger risk is in not doing this right now. I'll tell you why. I think there are a lot of macro-level shifts that have happened over the last few years and beyond that we are continuing to happen that if you follow them to their natural conclusion, it paints a really bleak picture for the DMO world. Let me break that down. Most DMOs spend their money on two levers, right? It's paid media and earned media. The paid media, they're going to usually work with an agency that's very qualified to figure out where to put, invest their money. That might be in programmatic digital, might be in Facebook, it might be in Google, the hundreds of thousands of places that you can spend your money and they're going to measure on those vanity metrics. We talked about to see if that's successful and they assume that that's creating demand and visitation.
Then earned media, they'll get fan tours in, they'll do media pitches, they'll do this other stuff to get articles written about their destination. Right? That's what they've done for years, it seems to work and it's great. Now that I think the earned media is getting harder because the journalists that are writing are getting more discerning and the audiences they serve are getting more discerning. But I think that where the bulk of the money is spent currently is on paid media. There's several factors that aren't good for DMOs. One is that the gatekeepers to those places you can spend money are getting bigger and have more control. I'm talking about Google, I'm talking about Facebook, I'm talking about Amazon. Right?
These guys are only just getting started at getting scalable and they're beginning to cost more over time because of that they have monopolies. That's one right, these guys are getting bigger. Two, with the privacy restrictions that are coming in have already been coming in for several years. The lack of targeting that's going to happen, you always see Google moving away from individual targeting to cohort targeting things like that. It's going to get less effective to target the specific audiences you want to target, right?
The other side of that privacy is also that consumers are getting more savvy in trying to opt out of ads as well, right? So that whether that's pop-up blockers, whether they're using streaming services to entertainment premium, Hulu instead of the base Hulu. So they can avoid ads altogether. The consumers want to avoid advertising in its traditional sense, right? So it's getting more expensive, it's getting harder to reach your audience, the consumers don't want it and the consumers are getting more fragmented where they choose to spend their time is changing, shifting. Like it's no longer where 80% of people are watching TV for 4 hours a day. There's so many different places in a lot of cases they're owned by the same big corporations. So not only is it harder to target them, but it's also harder to meet them where they are.
Then the final part is the consumer is getting so discerning right now about authenticity and truth and they're rejecting messages that don't seem to be in line with their values, they're rejecting messages that seem to be too corporate, they're rejecting messages that seem to be traditional in a lot of ways. So if you kind of put all that together in one big black box and say, well, what does it mean? What it means is, over the next year, two years, five years, 10 years, it's going to get more expensive to reach fewer people who care about you less and they're probably going to ignore you. Right? That's where we're going to head. And if they don't ignore you, they're probably going to resent you as well. Right? You might even have wrote the brand when you are talking to them. If you continue to press the same match the same buttons and pull the same levers that you have been.
We have to change. If we don't, that's not going to be good for us as DMOs if we're putting all our eggs in the paid media basket. So what we're doing and what I encourage all DMOs to do is shift gradually and responsibly over time a portion of your dollars from paid media to owned media, to start investing in building your owned assets, building content that is valued by people, valued media or branded entertainment the people actually want to consume, want to talk about want to share with their friends and families, want to look forward to seeing, want to feel a part of a tribe or a community with. You've got to build those audiences.
If you build the audiences, then the rest of that conversation doesn't matter anymore because now you can talk directly to an audience with the messaging that you want. You're not paying a gatekeeper, they've already got a brand affinity because they're consuming the content that they want, they're choosing to consume. It's over time going to be a lot easier to influence the buying decisions and to encourage these people to have a better experience in your destination because you can educate them in a more intimate way. So we're going from the spray-and-pray mentality to a conversational mentality. We're actually having one on one conversations with individuals based on what we know about them in real-time. That's where we're heading.
Adam Stoker: [00:57:59] So to your first point where you talk about the cost of paid media increasing, I listened to a podcast called the All In Podcast. If you don't listen to it and Stuart this is for you individually and also for anybody else that might be listening like this podcast is amazing. It's four billionaires from Silicon Valley talking about current events and then they talk about if you're in leadership or running an organization, how should you interpret these events and how should you action and basically what would they do in running a business based on what's happening in the current economy?
One of the things that they talked about was sales force is a pretty important bellwether or they publish their numbers on a very consistent basis and they've published for a long time, their cost to acquire a customer, and a lot of the, the other metrics that they track. The cost to acquire a customer for sales force according to these guys on this podcast went up something like 70%. I'll have to go back and get the actual number. But in fourth quarter of 2022 the cost to acquire a customer for sales force went up by 70%. If that's what's happening for sales force, it's happening for every organization in the world that's using the same platforms they're using to generate customers. The cost to acquire a customer is going up through paid media. If your only method of acquiring a customer is paid media, you're going to be in big, big trouble.
Stuart Butler: [00:59:30] Yeah, and you're going to be beholden to them. The other part of this is not only is it going to make it more expensive but you're going to lack control. You look at what's happened in the hotel space, for example. The OTAs have gotten, I guess it's a duopoly between Expedia and booking.com. But when there's a downturn in accommodation demand, people have nowhere to turn, they haven't built a good CRM or in a healthy database to communicate their social channels aren't interesting so they haven't got an audience. They have no mechanism to reach new people. So when they're at their leanest, when they're at their worst, when they have no profit margins, they turn to the one place which is the only place that could drive demand and yet they're taking 25, 30% off the top, right?
So it's just you're killing yourself to survive in that scenario had you invested time over the last 5, 10 years to nurture an audience that trusts you, that has an affinity with you, that feels like they're part of a community, then they're going to come to bat for you when it counts. We saw that COVID. There were hotels, mostly independent hotels that did really well because they reached out to a nurtured loyal audience and said we need your help. We need you to come stay with us. We need you to buy a gift card for a promissory of a future stay because otherwise we're going to have to close our doors and people came and defended them and that's the kind of relationship that destinations need to build with our consumers.
Adam Stoker: [1:01:01] Yeah, I love it. I think it's a great place to stop today.
Hey, everybody, I'm sure that you all enjoyed hearing about what Bandwango was up in Q1. They have sent me a new case study that again is just really impressive. If you don't know Bandwango and the way they use passes to help customers navigate the destination and maximize the economic impact of a visitor, you got to check them out. So I'll give you an example. Visit Hamilton County created a dine-out and it took place in January of 2023 from the 2nd to the 31st. And visitors were able to have a special and unique dining experience and deals at participating restaurants. The passport was used to promote deals and discounts at over 50 restaurants for both dine-in and carry-out. When a passholder checked to 5 restaurants in the month of January, they got a $25 gift card to one of the participating restaurants.
Over 8700 people signed up and nearly 20,400 check-ins happened at local restaurants in Hamilton County. That is unbelievable. And that's the type of engagement that every single destination is looking for with the people that come visit.
So if you haven't looked at creating a unique pass for your destination, doesn't have to be a dining pass, it could be a golf pass, it can be a museum pass, attraction pass, whatever assets you have in the destination. If you haven't tried it yet, get a pass from Bandwango, check it out and watch the engagement with your audience coming.
If you want to see more about this case study or anything else that Bandwango is up to, go to bandwango.com/dmp and you'll see that case study there and you'll be able to ask them specific questions about your destination, that's bandwango.com/dmp.
[End of transcript]
We recommend upgrading to the latest Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.
Please check your internet connection and refresh the page. You might also try disabling any ad blockers.
You can visit our support center if you're having problems.