Stuart Butler: [00:00:01] The vast majority of my budget is still on paid media. It's the core of what we do. You know it, it's tried and tested it yields positive ROI. We're going to continue to do it, but we're going to do it as a tactic as a part of a bigger strategy. So it's a short-term tactic that serves a long-term strategy.
Adam Stoker: [00:00:21] Hello, everybody and welcome to another episode of the Destination Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Stoker. Remember this is part 2 of my miniseries with Stuart Butler doing a deep dive on owned media. And if you haven't listened to part 1, make sure you go back to last week and listen to that one first because this will feel like it's kind of picking up in the middle. But I'm really excited to bring you episode 2. For one, Stuart is brilliant and I think you pick that up every time I have him on the show. But for two, I think this is one of the most important marketing concepts facing the tourism industry today and I think it's critical that everybody in the industry listen to this miniseries.
But before we jump into the conversation, I want to make sure that I remind you of a couple of things. First of all, we've implemented a feature called Telby that you can actually submit audio questions for us and we'd love to hear from you. I mean, we had a really great question from a listener in Australia recently and we were able to do an entire episode answering her question about the collab feature on Instagram. And that was a lot of fun to do. It's in the Destination Marketers LinkedIn group. So if you want to be able to click on the link and send us a question, make sure that you go to the Destination Marketers LinkedIn group and click on that link.
And if you're listening on Spotify, which by the way, that's where some of the most growth for our show is happening right now, we're getting a lot of new listeners on Spotify, make sure you check out the listener Q and A section. It only works on mobile, but there's a poll at the end of each show and there's also some Q and A. You can access both of those in the Spotify Q and A section. So make sure you check that out.
And now that we've got the intro taken care of, I'm really excited for you to hear part 2 of my miniseries of owned media and storytelling with Stuart Butler. So Stuart, depending on who you are, you believe that there's either three or four major types of media. I want to go through the four of them really quick. The way I see it is there's paid media where you're renting access to someone else's audience through paid media and buying advertising on that media. There's earned media which is public relations and getting other people to talk about you but in an unpaid manner.
There's some debate about whether or not social media platforms is its own form of media, shared media is what a lot of people will call it. We can debate that today whether or not we feel like it needs its own category. Then of course, owned media, which is the platforms that you actually own. We've talked about the different types of owned media. But the point of our book here is why is it so important that owned media become a key part of the marketing plan for tourism destinations.
But before we get into that argument, and I think we ought to just outline kind of in detail the four different types of media. I own an advertising agency. You have been in the advertising world and have owned an advertising agency before. And as both of us know, paid media is a critical part of a solid marketing plan for any organization. Why is paid media so important?
Stuart Butler: [00:03:33] It's a massive shortcut to success. If you have cash to spend, which hopefully your DMO you do have some, and that could be a small amount or a large amount. But what paid media allows you to do is reach an audience. Now, we've already talked a little bit about how that may be less effective than it once was. But typically, you're leasing space on another platform, say Facebook or Google to get permission to speak to their existing audience. They've built an audience by providing value to someone and by paying that person, the gatekeeper or the toll keeper, we like to call them, you get permission to talk to those people one time typically.
So it's effective because you don't have to spend the time to build a note to that audience. So if you're starting at zero, if you're a new business or if you're a DMO that is starting from scratch, paid media is often the only way you can get the flywheel beginning to spin. You have to start somewhere and paid media a lot of times is the quickest way to success, at least in terms of measurable success.
Adam Stoker: [00:04:42] Yeah, I've heard you say, especially as we've been talking about owned media, you've said the best time to plant a tree is 30 years ago. But the second-best time to plant a tree is today. While that's absolutely true, you can't sit and wait for that tree to grow without any firewood over time. Yes, I'm going to stretch this analogy to firewood here.
Stuart Butler: [00:05:03] You’re building trees so you can build them? Is that what I’m hearing?
Adam Stoker: [00:05:06] Listen, it's a self-sustaining commune that we're building here. Okay. But no, the idea though is if you need wood to fuel your fire to fuel your engine or whatever, yes, to plant a tree and wait for it to grow nobody can do that and nobody can as they're building their own media channels just sit back and hope that that's going to come to fruition. In the meantime, you still need to keep the fire burning. So that's I think paid media is going to be relevant still for a very, very long time because you can still, even though the metrics are changing, you can still calculate for the dollars that you spend, you're going to get a certain amount of return on that investment.
While like I said, the metrics I think are changing. In fact, I, I can't remember if we talked about this in our previous session, but sales force is a major SaaS company and they're pretty solid bellwether for what's happening in the digital marketing world. And in fourth quarter of 2022, their cost to acquire a customer went up 70% with the digital media spend that they were doing. So what that does is it completely messes up all of the metrics that they were using to calculate their return on investment and it kind of turns the metrics upside down because no longer are they getting the same returns because the cost to acquire a customer has gone up so much.
That's a microcosm. That's a small situation and definitely not fully representative of everyone in the industry. But like you said, media cost is somewhat inflationary that over time the expense is going to increase, the cost is going to increase. So your investment as a result is always going to have to increase. And that's the real challenge that I see with paid media is that at some point, if you haven't planted the tree, you're just going to be constantly dependent on that firewood that's going to get more and more scarce and expensive over time.
Stuart Butler: [00:07:08] You know, I want to defend paid media a little bit too because it almost sounds like we're bashing it as we need to do it but reluctantly so. Right? But even in a scenario where I had 100% of my owned media projects have come to fruition and they were growing beautiful neat new trees, I would still spend money on paid media. I probably wouldn't spend as much, but I would do it for a couple of reasons. One because I can reach new audiences. Right? That, that's the beauty of it. It's people that maybe I haven't spoken to before or haven't come into contact with my brand or one of they say I've created a bunch of TV shows. Maybe they're not familiar with it.
So paid media can get me access to new clubs of people or like new tribes. So my job at that point is to convert them into a tribe member of my ecosystem. And so we used to talk about this in the hotel space a lot that OTAs aren't bad, they're not in inherently evil. If you misuse them, it's a bad business practice. If you rely on OTAs for 100% of your revenue, it's a really dumb way to run a hotel. But if you use OTAs to find new customers that then as soon as they've booked, you do everything you can to convert them to a direct book at next time. When they check-in, you get their email address and then you give them incentives and things like that.
If you use these third-party tools and paid media publishers to acquire new business, and then you spend the rest of your time to nurture that relationship directly, then I think it's perfectly fine to use paid media. The other advantage to paid media is agility. So one of the easiest comparisons is paid ads on Google versus organic results on Google. It's the same place, it's the same search engine results page. I can have multiple placements. I can buy my way to the top with a pay-per-click ad or a Google ad or I can nurture my content to a point where I'm ranking well organically.
Now, the latter of those takes time and it takes experimentation and it's an investment in owned content. There are no guarantees that it's going to work. So if I have a hypothesis that there's a competitive keyword that has high search volume, and I go look on something like Google Trends to see what the search volume is and what the competition is, and I want to invest in that, it may be worthwhile me doing an experiment with paid search just to see if the quality of the traffic that's generated from that search engine results page is going to yield the kind of results I want. So I can spin up within minutes, I can spin up a Google Ads account to target that keyword and then measure its impact both the volume and the conversion rate and then prove or disprove my hypothesis. And then I can put the investment into the organic-owned stuff.
So I think paid media has there's two really big advantages over everything else. One is that sort of ability to test so I can go and prove or disprove and the other is to reach the new audience that I don't already have access to. So it's worth paying someone one time to reach a new audience member. It's insanity to continue to pay the same toll keeper to continue to talk to the same person.
Adam Stoker: [00:10:22] Yeah, I love your comment about testing specifically because the reality is you can learn so much more, so much faster with paid media than you can through some of these other channels. I mean, obviously, it's no secret, we're making an argument in this conversation for owned media. However, I am not making the argument to replace paid media with owned media because even as I create these owned media assets that we're going to talk about later, how in the world am I going to get eyeballs and eardrums on this content? Well, the way I'm going to do it is by distributing it through paid media. But my argument here and I think we're sharing this argument is the way paid media is being utilized now is not a permanent solution.
However, if I'm using this paid media to generate awareness and listenership for my media assets that I can then leverage other people's audiences and pull share of these audiences into my channels and then nurture these audiences through to an actual conversion or visitation or advocacy. And that's where I feel like the real power of it is paid media is not going away. I think the way in which it's being used is –
Stuart Butler: [00:11:39] I 100% agree. And I sit here as an evangelist for owned and own media. Most the vast majority of my budget is still on paid media. It's the core of what we do. It's tried and tested it yields positive ROI. We're going to continue to do it, but we're going to do it as a tactic as a part of a bigger strategy. So it's a short-term tactic that serves a long-term strategy. If it's your only tactic and it's your only strategy, then you're going to run into problems. You're going to see over time, it's going to get more expensive, it's going to get less effective and you're going to be continuing to pay the toll keepers. We know that they're going to continue to charge more. We know that they're going to continue to struggle to target the right audience. We know the audience is going to continue to get more fragmented.
So you have to stop planting those trees today. You have to start saying, what can I do to get me off of this drug because it is a drug and it's going to continue as long as I continue to pay it. But what happens tomorrow when your funding gets pulled or decreases? So there's a downturn in the economy and your funding comes from some kind of bedroom tax and now there's fewer people staying. We saw this in the economy. Right? The people that struggled the most came out of COVID with the least money to recover, that's because they were beholden only to paid media. If you've got to have this sort of 1, 2, 3 or 1, 2, 3, 4 strategy where you have something else to rely on. You don't have to keep mashing the paid media button.
Adam Stoker: [00:13:08] Yeah, I think there's a component of paid media that you touched on there that we haven't really discussed. And that's over time, for example, if you think back to some of the, I love Mad Men, it's, it's one of my favorite TV series to watch. But they would run a TV ad and hit the entire nation at 6 p.m. and everybody would see it and go they'd go make a decision. Well, that's pretty easy when you can target the entire country with one ad. Over time with the emergence of digital media and the emergence of social media and all of the different platforms and opportunities for advertising that have emerged, the fragmentation of paid media has become so significant that that's also raising the price to generate the same audience or the same impact because you have to now buy in more watering holes than you did in the past in order to reach the same quantity of possible visitors that you were reaching before.
Another challenge with paid media that I think is going to continue, I don't think it's going to ease up is the number of places to spend money on.
Stuart Butler: [00:14:15] Yeah, 100% and it's hard to manage. It adds complexity to your planning and to your execution and it opens you up to mistakes and inefficiencies and poor performance. And so you sort of see two approaches that some DMOs are making. One is I'm going to stick to the core of what I know and I'm not going to explore other stuff and then you get the folks that are just trying everything and seeing what works. I prefer a core and explore kind of an approach where we have the things that we know work and 80% of our budget is going to go on those things every year and we'll tweet them and we'll optimize them and we'll test them and we'll do that thing.
But I'm going to spend 20% of my budget testing new things, and seeing if there are new opportunities that we haven't seen before. And then each year I sort of rinse and repeat, okay, some of those 20% now go into the core and some of the core drops out because it's just not effective. You can't be everywhere and you can't also be tomorrow in the same place as you were today and accept the same results, you have to continue to evolve.
Adam Stoker: [00:15:19] Absolutely. So a benefit that offsets that a little bit of paid media and then we'll move to earned media is the fact that yes, we have fragmented so much, but also the ability to target has gotten a lot more finite. Although with some of the first-party data issues that are coming up that we probably need to discuss at some point that'll affect it. But the another major value of paid media is the ability to target in a very minute group. And I think that has a lot of benefit as well.
Stuart, let's move to earned media. Earned media is a place where I actually feel like the destination marketing industry has done a really good job of understanding its value like not everybody has the perfect PR plan. But everybody, at least for the most part seems to understand the value of getting travel writers into the destination and hosting media personnel. Earned media is a great way to get your message out especially since it's not paid. So lots of times it's more cost-effective than some of the paid media that's being done.
You mentioned that you're an evangelist of earned and owned media. Tell me why earned media is such an important thing.
Stuart Butler: [00:16:36] I think it's the kind of endeavor that you reap what you sow. The more effort you put in directly correlates to the output. If I look at us as an example, we're a larger DMO with a large budget, but any DMO of any budget can put invest time into earned media by building relationships with folks, by bringing people to town, things like that. It doesn't have to cost a penny. So I really like it from that regard but what we see is we as it's a fraction of our budget compared to paid media was we spend significantly more on paid media than earned. But the results we get from earned, I would argue may be more impactful. We certainly get more impressions from earned than we do from paid. When we add up all of the places that people are talking about us.
I'll be frank, I bundle earned and shared together. I don't separate the two. I think shared is a subset of earned. I know you tend to lean the other way, but which I understand the argument. I like to think of them together, but we tend to get more, more total impressions, more value and it tends to be more authentic like it's not coming from our voice, it doesn't seem to be propaganda. When I bring a writer, a travel writer into town, and we're a sensory-friendly destination. We do a lot of work with people on the autism spectrum. So if I bring a family in t the travel writers or just a family that talks about sensory situations and challenges, I bring them to town. When they write about our destination with their voice and through a lens of truth, it's so much more impactful. It's going to persuade way more people and it's going to target a specific niche that we're trying to target, but they're already talking to as well.
So to me, earned is sort of, it works in tandem with the paid and with the owned. We'll talk about the later on how you can kind of create a flywheel with using all three of these levers. But for me, for any DMO with any budget, you should be putting significant time and energy into earned by building relationships by telling good stories, by sharing the great things and what it can do over time is it can change perception of people. Because if I run a paid ad that says Myrtle Beach is a great culinary destination, people will maybe believe it but probably not. They're going to look at that as an ad. But if they read in Bon Appetit and they read in all these culinary magazines about the latest greatest chefs and latest restaurants and the latest cuisines and planning a foodie excursion in Myrtle Beach, that's way more impactful. That controls the narrative in a way that we can't through regular advertising. It's more believable. It's going to be more persuasive and it's going to be more impactful.
Adam Stoker: [00:19:24] Yeah. So one of the things that you mentioned that stood out to me and it's fascinating because you said you get more impressions from earned media than you do in pay. Did I hear that correctly? So let me ask you what percent of your budget is earned media compared to paid?
Stuart Butler: [00:19:46] It's an order of magnitude lower for sure. I'd have to look back. But I think PR budget is probably 3 or 4% of our total budget if that and paid media is 50% plus of our budget.
Adam Stoker: [00:20:03] So isn't that incredible? And that's really what I wanted to highlight here is the amount of investment that it takes to generate the same number of eyeballs or attention that you're reaching compared to what you have to spend in paid media. I mean, the delta there is amazing. I mean, paid media is what probably 80 plus percent of your budget and you're talking 3 to 5% is on earned media and you're actually getting more eyeballs through your earned media efforts than you are in paid.
And, again, I'm not trying to devalue paid here because paid is a guaranteed number of eyeballs based on your spend. Whereas earned media, and the flywheel associated with it and how that can kind of snowball like you get one outlet to write a story, another outlet might cover it and it goes on and on and on. Right? That's something you can't really predict. Whereas paid media is much more predictable.
So I understand the importance of both, but the power of a good earned media strategy is exactly what you just said that I can spend a small portion of my budget and actually make a larger impact for the destination through getting other people to tell my story than I ever could with paid. It's a pretty amazing example of the value.
Stuart Butler: [00:21:21] I think it's important to clarify that it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. An impression, a paid impression is not equivalent to an earned impression, necessarily some earned impressions would be considered more valuable, some would be considered less valuable. So I definitely don't want to directly compare the two, but in terms of exposure, I think we tend to really like the exposure we get. Although, I think you could argue that the way that PR is historically be measured is a little antiquated. We we've sort of evolved at the methodology of looking at how we value earned media. But I would say context is everything with earned.
For example, like, let's talk about Myrtle Beach and break it down. I would consider being on a list from TripAdvisor of best summer family-friendly vacations earned media. If we're on a list and they're publishing that and I would consider that earned media. We would probably get a lot more impressions on that than say the best full getaways. But strategically for me, if I'm trying to turn Myrtle Beach from a Memorial Day to Labor Day summer family vacation destination into a year-round place where people can come and experience great culture, great food, great music and things like that. If I start getting on an earned media list from TripAdvisor or Bon Appetit or whoever it is that's talking about a full experience in Myrtle Beach, even though I may not get as many impressions on that, strategically that's more valuable to me because it's on-mission of what, what we're trying to do.
And so not all earned impressions are equal and they're certainly not all equal to paid impressions either. So I think you've got to look at the context when you're looking at measuring earned media.
Adam Stoker: [00:23:08] Well and they're also at different phases of the funnel. So for example, earned media is so focused at the awareness level of the funnel. There's very little selling done through earned media. It's more of an awareness play and then you need to use paid media to try to convert that audience from someone in the awareness phase of the funnel to ultimately a visitor. So, yeah, I totally agree with that. I want to share an example from a good friend of mine who's also in South Carolina. His name's Robb Wells and he runs the small town of Beaufort. Well, he doesn't run the town. He runs the DMO and it's Beaufort South Carolina.
Earned media in his mind is the most important part of his marketing plan. The way he outlined it for me is I'm sandwiched between Savannah and Hilton Head as far as where they're competing for visitors. And he said there is no way I can outspend Savannah and Hilton Head. It's just impossible. But he said I can focus on getting articles written about me in major publications and I can get more eyeballs than I could through paid media because of the way the metrics work out.
And so what he's done is really focused on getting listed as for example, one of the best small towns in America, he's been listed as one of the top 11 by Travel & Leisure. So he's been able to achieve that and that's how he can punch above his weight class and do more than he could with his paid media budget. So again, earned media in my mind is so critical because of your ability to generate awareness for your destination regardless of budget size.
And so whereas for you, you can spend 5% of your budget on earned media. Whereas Robb spends a much higher percentage and you guys are able to generate kind of proportional impact for you.
Stuart Butler: [00:25:08] I think it is about awareness, but it's also about influence. And it's about controlling the narrative and the perception of your brand. I think earned media is really powerful at that because a lot of times the narratives are not being well, the stories are not being told through your voice, they're being told through someone else's voice that is usually trusted by that audience. So if I'm a content creator or if I'm a magazine like Southern Living, then I have a caught loyal audience that they know when they read that magazine, that what it says is true like they built that trust between them and the audience.
And so Southern Living saying that Beaufort South Carolina is on this list is going to be more weight than Beaufort itself saying it's on a list. So you're basically being loaned the voice of these other people to tell your story for you. So it's a lot more impactful in terms of influence.
Adam Stoker: [00:26:01] Yeah, great point. Well, you touched on it earlier. We talked about shared media in fact, on my outline here. I've got shared with a question mark next to it because I think both of us view shared as a subset of another major type of media. You see it as a subset of earned media and I'm really interested to hear your take on that. So maybe we start there and to be clear, I see it as a subset of owned media and neither of us necessarily feel like it justifies its own full category compared to these others. So let's make an argument for --.
Stuart Butler: [00:26:38] I think that's why people separated some because you can argue both sides of that owned and earned. I see it as earned because by definition is something that is reflective of your reputation, it's reflective of the efforts you've put in to create a product or an experience that people respond to. And so whether that's the destination itself or your marketing, if you've become more of a lifestyle brand, it's still something that you've put effort into creating and nurturing. And it's the response that you earn from an audience in this case instead of it being a media audience, it's typically a consumer audience, but I still see it as being the earned.
You don't own it. The reason I say you don't own it is because you don't control it. With owned media, you control it 100% to the letter of every written word to the pixel of every image or video. You control it 100%. With social comments and sharings you have zero control, probably less control of that than you do to traditional earned media. So that's why I see it as earned because you really don't have it as something that's yours that you can control.
Adam Stoker: [00:27:47] Yeah, it's great to hear you articulate that because I actually think that there's different components of shared media that actually fall under each category. So for example, if you're buying media on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or any of the other social platforms, that's paid media. So there's one component of social media that you can put underpaid. I agree with you that what other people say about you on social media is a subset of earned media. I think that includes comments, you don't have control over any of that specifically.
The place where I disagree with you a little bit is on when you're talking about the destination doing its posting on a consistent basis on its social channels that while it might not own the platform, you could argue that it owns the channel. The ability to at least it owns the messaging that goes out and controls the message that goes out when you're organically posting on your own social channels. But then as soon as you put it out there, the shares, comments, likes, all of that, I agree. I think that falls under earned media.
So the reason I don't like including shared media under earned media as a whole is I think what you then sort of lose is the intentional content strategy that comes from building an organic social media strategy as opposed to a basically a proactive versus a reactive social media strategy. That's why I think that you probably want to look at social in some way as an owned media channel so that you can have a very proactive social strategy as it’s attached to.
Stuart Butler: [00:29:32] We're actually in alignment on that. I think where we differ is the semantics of what shared media is. I draw a box around shared media being not the stuff I share, but the stuff other people share. So the comments, the likes, the literal resharing of my content. The content I publish on my channels, I see a post on Facebook even though I don't own that land, I'm still “leasing the land” even though I may not pay for it. But increasingly, I'm having to pay to actually reach an audience when I do publish it.
But I see a publication of a social post no different than I see a publication of an email or a publication of a YouTube show or something like that. To me that's distribution of my own content is what it is. I personally don't bucket that into the Monica shared media. I think if you broaden the definition to include that, then you're 100% right.
Adam Stoker: [00:30:31] Well and I think what we agree on is that the value of this shared media is so fragmented across the different categories that it's hard to just put it in one category or its own category because components of it fit under each other category, paid, earned and owned. I think that's where we're aligned on shared media and kind of how do you categorize it.
Stuart Butler: [00:30:56] I struggled with this for a while before we met each other and you coined the term and I adopted the term branded entertainment. I was toying around and I was actually speaking at conferences about a concept called valued media which took out the question of whether it was paid, earned or owned. It was the question was, did people actually want to consume it? Most advertising we spend money on is we're forcing it in front of people and most people don't want to see it. But if we create, let's say a TV show, and I use that term loosely because you could distribute it wherever you want, that asset itself is an owned media, but then you have to publish it somewhere. So you may have to share it on say a Netflix, but then you may need to pay to drive awareness to it.
So these are three components for the same project, the same media. But you're doing all three of these tactics. To me, what is the overall objective? It’s creating value media that people actually want to consume. I've since kind of backed away from that, that line of thinking, I think that was overcomplicating things. But there's some truth in that. Like if we got to remember what we're actually trying to do with the audience. We're trying to convince them of either a new decision or influence a decision that they're already planning to make in a positive way. So we use these three levers that paid earned and own in different ways, but we need to make sure they're working together in coordination to accomplish that goal because not one of these will really work independently without the others. You could argue that earned media may but you sort of need to have a 1, 2, 3 approach if you're going to be really effective.
Adam Stoker: [00:32:35] Absolutely. What I've said at conferences when I speak is I believe that a good marketer is nurturing all three paid, earned and owned. And if they're ignoring or neglecting any of the three components, that's where you're not doing your full job. But in no way do I think that anybody should be focused on any singular one of those three major components and neglecting the others because all of them together make a sound marketing strategy.
Stuart Butler: [00:33:03] 100% agree. Yeah.
Adam Stoker: [00:33:05] We've teased it a lot. We've touched on it a lot. We've mentioned it a lot. Owned media. Owned media is obviously the kind of the core of the argument that we're making in this conversation that as far as I'm concerned I do feel like one of the major blind spots in the industry is that so many marketers are neglecting this concept of owned media, especially in the tourism industry. If I was to define owned media, I would define it as media that you control, that you plan and build the entire message, and have the ability to retain control of the audience after the release of the media. That's how I would define it. I'm curious, Stuart how you would define it.
Stuart Butler: [00:33:52] I think I would agree with that. The edges get a little bit fuzzy because like we already discussed when you publish it somewhere, like I create a show of some kind and then I put it on YouTube or I share it on Facebook, do I still own that? Well, sort of, but not really. It's sort of like a hub and spoke. That the hub is the content itself, the spoke is the distribution of it. I think that's the way I try to think about it and try to articulate it is there's the asset itself, the product, the content and then there's the distribution.
I control both of those, I can control what the content actually is, the message in that, the production quality of that. But I also control when and where it's distributed to a degree whether that's organically shared or paid shared, I still control it. So yeah, I think it's ownership, I mean, it's in the name. It's owned. It’s ownership and to me, the real value of owned media is that you are building an asset that can potentially become an annuity. So if I build, say a series on YouTube and over time I build an audience that resonates with, then I have a direct line of communication to those people. I can push messaging to those people at relatively little cost by producing new content at any point. I'm not paying a toll keeper or gatekeeper every time I want to talk to that audience.
Now, social media has sort of changed that a little bit because now if I have a page and people follow it, I still have to pay to reach a large percentage of those. But for the most part, if I'm creating a blog or if I'm creating a podcast, or if I'm creating a YouTube show, it's relatively inexpensive or free for me to publish a new iteration of that. Over time, the hope is you build an audience that you can communicate with throughout time and then that becomes the annuity. I don't have to continue to spend money to reach an audience because I've already done the leg work, put in the effort to build that audience myself.
Adam Stoker: [00:35:52] Yeah, you said the word control several times. We've used the word owned. Right? As we look at that word, why is that so important? I think one of the issues is when you run paid media to someone else's audience, you immediately have to fit into someone else's parameters. So for example, on Facebook, your text can only take up a certain percentage of the ad space and you've got the same thing with other platforms. However, if you build a piece of content that you own entirely, nobody can tell you how it has to be structured. I think I'll give you an example is what started our relationship is I created a podcast where I could share my philosophies, I could share my opinions, and I didn't have to be beholden to what any organization. We have several governing type organizations in our industry. I didn't have to conform to their opinions or anybody else's opinions. It was strictly me.
Now, those opinions happened to resonate pretty clearly with you as you were listening to the show and hearing what I had to say and ultimately led to you and I taking this concept of owned media and working together to build a comprehensive strategy for Visit Myrtle Beach. And so I feel like the value of that control is that because you get to be authentically you with zero restrictions. And so if I'm looking at it as a destination, I get to be authentically Myrtle Beach or authentically whoever the destination is that is building this strategy. The audience can now with zero restrictions, connect to us as a destination as opposed to indirectly connecting to us through a platform that they didn't necessarily intend to engage with.
Stuart Butler: [00:37:44] I agree 100%. You have constraints some of which are arbitrary when you're utilizing someone else's platform. So you remove all those constraints and it frees you up to turn what is -- I would compare it to going from two-dimensional to three-dimensional. Like an ad is very two-dimensional. It's a very finite amount of time with a very limited amount of opportunity to convey a message. But with content today and the distribution opportunities that we have like long-form conversations in podcasts or video or whatever, you really have zero constraints. So you can articulate a message in way that not only is it more compelling and resonates, but it's more true to your voice. You can be authentically you.
I would say when I started listening to your podcast as an example, it wasn't that I agreed with 100%. Although we align on a lot of things, we do disagree on certain things. But the fact that you had a platform and a forum that enabled people to have debate and discussion on topics that interested me then that was fascinating to me and I went from being an audience member to a community member and that's a big difference. If I'm just a casual observer versus I'm a participant, that's ultimately what we want as destinations. We want to turn people from audiences into community members or into a tribe. We can do that more effectively without constraints enforced upon us by third parties, by controlling the length, the format, the distribution, the content, the message, all the things that makeup content.
Adam Stoker: [00:39:21] Totally agree. And it's interesting as you think about owned media as a concept, this idea that you became a community member. You can think of very few brands that through paid media and again I'm not bagging on paid media, it's just in contrast to what we're discussing here with owned media. It's difficult in an advertisement to get a fan club or a community built. Now there's some advertisements have been so good that brands have been –
Stuart Butler: [00:39:52] Dollar Shave Club would be an example of that. When Dollar Shave Club came out with that first commercial, it was perfect. But that was not a traditional ad, right? It was long form; it wasn't 30 seconds. It was really an entertaining piece of content in disguise as an ad. And so that's why it was so effective. So that's where we sort of bleed between these different mediums and these different tactics are paid, earned and owned. That was one of the first that really smacked me in the face. And I was like, oh, that's what advertising can be. That's really cool.
Adam Stoker: [00:40:26] Well, and I think it's an excellent example too because they created a piece of content that wasn't necessarily beholden to the other platforms and then they sliced it and put pieces of it on other platforms, but they used it to funnel people into their community and then ultimately leverage that into sales. I think that's a microcosm of what we're recommending for the destination marketing industry with the idea of creating content that you own and then leveraging that content through paid media, through earned media and building that into a community. Then ultimately, obviously visitors. It's just a much longer and more drawn-out process than running an ad and expecting a website click immediately.
Stuart Butler: [00:41:15] There's two things that are holding DMOs back. When you started this by talking about this is probably the opportunity for the biggest opportunity for DMOs right now is to expand in owned media. I think one is the risk of aversion that we already talked about in the industry. People want to play it safe. They are beholden to stakeholders that are demanding results, but they're also beholden to impatience. They need to have instant gratification because it's hard to articulate that I'm going to invest X dollars, whatever that is in something today that may or may not work. Even when it works, I don't really know how it is.
It's very speculative to do this right, to create entertainment is hard otherwise everyone would be doing it. So you have to sort of have some faith in the process. You have to be really deli with your strategy, you have to mitigate your risk. So it takes a lot of work upfront, but if you don't do it today, you're not going to do it tomorrow. And if you don't do it today, you're not going to know whether or not you're successful down the line. It's not that we're putting all of our budget into owned media, far from it. We're trying to get to 10% of our budget in the owned media. We're not there yet.
When I arrived a couple of years ago, we were probably to 1 or 2%. We've shifted that to 4, 5, 6. But we're on a mission I want to get to 10 and see how it's working. But in order to get permission to do that, we had to do a lot of work with our stakeholders. We had to educate them. We had to show them examples which we'll talk about later on in this conversation about TV shows like Yellowstone and things like that. Out of banks would be another one. The impact that entertainment can have on travel, we've seen historically this work with things like New Zealand in Lord of the Rings. We've seen things like Game of Thrones have a massive impact on commercial tourism in certain areas where it was shot.
So we know that there can be benefits beyond the content itself. So educating people on that and then educating them on the value of controlling the message in a way that you build a community instead of just an audience. Educating them on the ways of building an annuity instead of having to continue to pay the advertiser. So in a lot of ways, the conversations we've been having for the last couple of hours, we've had to have these conversations as a foundation with our stakeholders to get them up to the speed and get them comfortable to allow us to do these investments, to take these risks, to do these experiments. It takes a lot of effort upfront that to me is it that and the risk is why a lot of DMOs are not going this route. Some are tough and some are doing a good job.
Adam Stoker: [00:43:53] I think I'll wrap up the owned media portion of the discussion by saying if owned media is done correctly compared to other forms of media, other forms of media can generate visitation. I think owned media if done correctly can generate visitation but even beyond that, also advocacy. So even if somebody doesn't ultimately Visit Myrtle Beach, if they talk about Myrtle Beach in a positive way, we've still had a successful interaction with that audience member, they're part of our community but they haven't necessarily converted as a visitor. It's not that it can't happen, but I don't believe that creating a group of advocates is as easy with the other two forms of media that we've mentioned, paid and owned.
Stuart Butler: [00:44:43] Yeah, I agree 100%. And advocacy is absolutely what you want. I will take it a little step further because what we do, what we're trying to do, how we talk about ourselves as a team internally is we talk less about Myrtle Beach being a destination. We talk more about it being a lifestyle brand. What I mean by that is I believe that we can infiltrate consumers beyond the visit. Right? We can be a part of their identity. We can be a part of the badges of honor that they wear, something they're proud of that's the mission we're on. It's not just about the transaction and the heads and beds, although that's ultimately what we're trying to do, but it's about creating a community that people are proud to be a part of and want to tell other people that they're proud of. So that's why I think of us more as a lifestyle brand than I do as a destination.
Now, we're at the very beginning of that journey. It's going to take years to get to where we want to go. But you've got to put the effort in and to your point, you cannot do that at all which is paid and earned. Those are important parts of it. But without the owned, it's impossible to do that.
Adam Stoker: [00:45:51] Great stuff, Stuart. I totally agree. And like I said, owned media is critical to any marketing plan at this point. I think this has been a good discussion as to why. For everybody listening, I hope you enjoyed this second episode of this owned media miniseries with Stuart Butler. Thanks, everybody for listening. We've got more coming. There's a few more episodes on the way and we've just scratched the surface of this really, really important concept.
Guys, if any of these concepts we talked about stand out to you and you'd like more information on how to do it for your destination, you know I own an agency called Relic and this is what we do for tourism destinations. So if you're curious about how to make it work for you, reach out at adam@relicagency.com. We can show you not only how we've made it work for Myrtle Beach, but how we can make it work for destinations of all shapes and sizes.
Thanks, everybody for listening. If you don't already follow us on social media, make sure you find us at destination_pod on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter, the Destination Marketing Podcast on YouTube and make sure you join the LinkedIn Group, Destination Marketers and make sure you subscribe and follow wherever you're listening and don't forget to leave us a rating or a review. Thanks, everybody for listening and we'll see you next week.
Hey guys, I've got to tell you about a company in the industry that I'm really excited about. I was able to meet AJ Brau who's the founder of Wander a couple of years ago. Wander is a really unique mapping technology for destinations that is kind of taking the industry by storm right now. A few of the things that you can do with Wander that I think are pretty unique is, first of all, you can update this map in real-time so that your visitors can get reliable information that's timely and that hasn't been outdated.
You can also kind of see interesting data. Google Maps doesn't necessarily share with you all the data of how people are navigating your destination. But with a Wander Map, you can actually have this custom map that allows you to see visitor location, what are the places that are most visited, what are the most viewed categories on the map. And then you can use QR codes at each location to help visitors use the Wander Map for the rest of their trip. You can also really seamlessly integrate it into your destination website and it just takes a few weeks to get up and running.
So if you have not yet engaged with Wander, make sure you get a free demo at wandermaps.com/dmp. That DMP is for Destination Marketing Podcast, wandermaps.com/dmp. Check it out.
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