Transcript: Jared Price: [00:00:01] Don't be shy about telling the stories that you believe in and don't let somebody else tell that story. Own it. Adam Stoker: [00:00:11] Hello, everyone and welcome to another episode of the Destination Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Stoker. We've got a fun show for you today. We've got someone who's been on the show before. Some of you may know him as ChatJPT however, that's not his true identity. His true identity is Jared Price. Most people call him JP and he is our Director of Business Development at Relic. JP, thanks for being here. Jared Price: [00:00:37] Of course. Thanks for having me. Long-time listener. Second-time caller. Adam Stoker: [00:00:43] Well, you know what? Thanks for calling in. Jared Price: [00:00:44] Of course. Thanks for putting me on the air. Adam Stoker: [00:00:46] Absolutely. I might regret it later, but we'll start. Jared Price: [00:00:49] You and me both. Adam Stoker: [00:00:49] So JP, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on is you're on the front lines. You probably talk to more destinations, at least a larger variety of destinations than anybody else in our organization besides me. And so I thought it would be interesting for us to talk a little bit about what's happening in the industry right now. Before we do though, let's take a little bit of background. Let's remind everybody a little bit of your story. I think we may have talked about it briefly at one point, but let's give everybody a quick recap of what led you to where you are today. Jared Price: [00:01:19] Yeah, of course. So I've been here at Relic for, I think, 3.5 years. I was doing some counting yesterday. I remember what months ago in which order. So, yeah, just about 3.5 years here. I came from a proposal, writing background, proposal in grants. That was kind of my emphasis in my studies and then one thing led to another. Now we're here, it's been a kind of a good experience. Adam Stoker: [00:01:43] You basically just skipped the whole story. Jared Price: [00:01:45] The whole story is boring. Yeah, exactly. Adam Stoker: [00:01:48] One thing led to another and we're sitting here recording a podcast today. Jared Price: [00:01:52] On a dark stormy night. I was born. Adam Stoker: [00:01:54] Okay, we're going away somewhere between those two stories would be great. Jared Price: [00:02:00] I never saw myself in a sales role or marketing even, but I've been surprised at how much I've enjoyed it. Like you were saying, I taught to a lot of destinations across the country and it's definitely one of my favorite parts of the job is kind of getting the scuttlebutt from people who are more trenches here on the trenches with the actual destination marketing. Kind of just getting a feel for what's going on there, different needs that they're having, different problems, pain points. It's interesting to kind of hear the variety of things that DMOs and CVBs are facing currently. It's been fun. Adam Stoker: [00:02:40] Well, one of the things that I think is interesting is we acquired the agency that you worked for back in November of 2020 which was a fascinating time. Jared Price: [00:02:49] Fascinating time. Adam Stoker: [00:02:50] Yeah, that first COVID year and to try to blend two cultures when everybody's working from home. Jared Price: [00:02:55] There was a little health scare, wasn't there? Adam Stoker: [00:02:57] Something. Jared Price: [00:02:57] Something like that? So not a conspiracy theorist. That was a joke, but I don't know where to go from there. Adam Stoker: [00:03:08] But we acquired that agency and you were a part of that organization. You guys had actually worked with a DMO in that organization, but we were able to bring you in and maybe I'm speaking for you a little bit here when I shouldn't, but – Jared Price: [00:03:22] You're doing a better job of the story than I am. I was. Adam Stoker: [00:03:25] No, you're doing great, I promise. But we kind of opened up your, I think to the tourism industry and your team runs business development for both tourism and for our other agency, E.K.R. What was it like to learn tourism kind of from the ground up? Jared Price: [00:03:43] Yeah, you're absolutely right. Where Adam, you and I had spoken and work together on a couple projects when I was at that agency before the acquisition. And yeah, it really is a space that I didn't think much about or even no really kind of the scope of what was involved and my eyes were definitely open to the whole industry. It was interesting because I feel like it was kind of out of the frying pan and into the fire of tourism where it's like trying to catch a train just by holding your arm out. It's like, okay, well, we've got to figure this out and figure out quick. That's one of the best ways to learn, in my opinion. Just jumping right into it. Let's get our hands a little bit dirty, learn about what's going on here.
It's been incredibly fulfilling just kind of seeing what goes into it and the results there. Obviously, everybody loves tourism. It's a fun space to be in because the product is great. It's travel creates some of those most impactful and memorable experiences in everybody's lives. So it's been great to get that angle and again, just dive head first into the industry and it's been very, very eye-opening. Adam Stoker: [00:04:54] Well, what's interesting is I think some of our paths are somewhat parallel. What I mean by that is when I came into the industry, I learned a lot over time. But then when I started having conversations with different destinations every week in putting the show together, my learning was accelerated like crazy. I feel like for you and being in our Biz Dev director role and talking to so many DMOs is think your learning was accelerated very similarly. Jared Price: [00:05:21] Oh, exactly. It's scrambling, taking notes in every call and it's like, okay, well, that doesn't sound familiar but I'm going to act like I know what that means. Kidding for the most part. But just diving right into it. This is going to sound corny, but I feel like the people in the destination marketing industry, they're kind of a unique breed here. I haven't met a single person that I like that is a rotten individual by any means. Everyone's been really friendly and helpful. Also, you know, just seeing the level of passion that people have for the places that they live and work in. It's cool because I feel like that element of community and building from that, it's kind of a bit of a, a lost effort, I guess bringing people together. It just seems to get overlooked and kind of contemporary day and age where people are fractured everyone is they got different interests and proclivities and – Adam Stoker: [00:06:16] Buried in their phones. Jared Price: [00:06:17] Exactly. Exactly. And so the place-building aspect has been really fun for me to see and participate in. Adam Stoker: [00:06:24] Great. So it's been kind of interesting to watch you go from learning tourism at the beginning to, you've kind of evolved to the point where you're even doing a little bit of thought leadership. You were able to go speak at advocacy summit for Destinations International. What was that like? And let's then introduce the topic that you were discussing. Jared Price: [00:06:42] Absolutely. Yeah. And just again, a matter of scale, it's how do I sound like I know what I'm talking about when I'm in front of a group of people. Again, another bad joke. But that was a great experience. Again, some of the things that we were talking about. I was speaking on the importance of owned media and the value of building audiences and it was fun to be there, for one. It was also fun to see that message resonate and see people's reactions, had some great discussions. I think people are definitely starting to see the importance there and looking into ways to start adopting a more owned media-centric approach. When we first started talking about this and really placing an emphasis on the owned media aspect, those initial discussions there it was kind of a less of a defined concept that people weren't necessarily keyed into, but those conversations have shifted and now people are more educated and they see the value of building out an owned media strategy. So it's interesting to see those conversations shift more from what do you mean by owned media and kind of into well, what do we do now to move into that? Adam Stoker: [00:07:58] Yeah, as we've talked about building audiences through owned media, originally we talked about how in the Pezzo model, paid, earned, shared and owned that for some reason in the destination marketing industry, it felt like owned was being overlooked. I'm taking that and I'm just going to leave that statement there for a second and go somewhere else and then we'll come back to it. But I look at the destination marketing industry and one of the most important concepts that's being spoken about in the industry right now is sustainability. When we think about sustainability, we look at it from a perspective of for one, make sure that the assets we are promoting are going to be there long term, whether that's natural assets, like we've had conversations recently with our friends at Grand County. In Grand County, they have Arches National Park, right? They want to make sure that those arches are preserved so that humanity can enjoy them for as long as possible. So, sustainability of assets is one, right? Then we talk about economic sustainability, of making sure that a community that's based in a tourism economy can thrive and that the residents can afford to live, work and play there. Right? We also talk about how from a sustainability perspective, we want to make sure that we're leaving the place better for the residents long term, we're making it a better place for them to live. But one of the things that we don't really talk about is approaching our marketing from a sustainable perspective or a sustainability perspective. Ss I've thought a lot about this, I think about the way we're marketing and if we just like take DMO X or DMO Y, whoever it is, and we say, okay, they're allotted let's use a million dollars because the math is really easy. Okay, so they're allotted a million dollars or so annually, hopefully growing based on the success of the organization. But let's say it's a million dollars. After they staff up their organization, maybe they take $250,000 to $300,000 to staff up to have a facility to work out of an office space, a visitor center and all that kind of stuff. That's their expense on an annual basis. Then the remainder goes into marketing and a portion of that's going to go into earned media. So, public relations, things like that. Then the large majority of it is going to go to paid media. So let's say maybe half of that million-dollar budget is going to go to paid media. At the end of the year, that budget has to be completely refunded and we're starting at zero again every year. Now there's things that are a little bit sustainable, I think earned media is sustainable. But I think the paid media strategy that most people are executing on when you think about the impression that's happening, that immediate impression as soon as the person sees it, the spend that went into that impression is gone forever. If they didn't convert, if they didn't book a trip, if they didn't go to the website, what if they didn't follow the call to action? That budget is gone forever. I look at destination marketing and I say if sustainability is so important to the destination marketing industry, why do we treat our budgets like they are a disposable asset? Jared Price: [00:11:10] Yeah, and it's the traditional tried and true method, not even tried and true anymore. It's changing. That's the whole topic of this discussion here. But how do we feed the beast of paid media? Obviously, we've got these do dollars to spend, we've got these metrics that we have been abiding by, but something that you've talked about in the podcast too. It's like, what's the threshold for those diminishing returns as far as paid impressions get? As you're saying, there's kind of almost an ephemeral nature there to those ads where yeah, if they didn't interact or engage with that, then yeah, it's just vanished. Where's that money gone? Adam Stoker: [00:11:43] Yeah. And I think that's really one of my biggest problems in it's not that I dislike paid media because I actually think we should be using paid media and you and I can actually get into the discussion of capturing existing demand versus creating new demand because I think that's an interesting discussion. But when we talk about paid media as we're currently doing it, we look outside the destination marketing industry and we see that with inflation and some of the issues that have hit, that other organizations that actually have the numbers to attribute the return on investment for their marketing, their cost to acquire a customer has gone up by 75% or more. The luxury we have in the destination marketing industry is that we don't have the measurement tool to be able to say, oh, well, our cost to acquire a customer has gone up by this much. But what that means is that a lot of us are spending these paid media dollars in an attempt to generate visitation. Our cost to acquire a customer is way too high and we don't know it and we're just doing the same thing over and over and over again because it's comfortable. Jared Price: [00:12:47] Yeah, absolutely. Adam Stoker: [00:12:48] So when you actually start to look at how we're utilizing paid media in the destination marketing industry, in my opinion, it is not a sustainable approach to destination marketing. So that's where you start to look at owned media and the fact that we're building evergreen assets like a podcast, like a YouTube series, like even major streaming series and things like that, all the different components of owned media that you build, these are assets that you can then use forever and you have them at your disposal to help build audiences. I think that's the real difference is I think we need to be using paid media not to try to generate direct visitation, in most cases. Instead, we should be using paid media to drive to our evergreen assets, which by the way, at the end of this year, we're going to have something to show for our budget. We can actually drive to those assets with our paid budget for next year. And during that time, we can be working on new owned assets. So the ability to use paid media, which is an incredible tool but in a different way, a more sustainable way is why I think that owned media is going to continue to grow and the utilization of it is going to continue to grow in the destination marketing industry. Jared Price: [00:14:06] Absolutely. And Adam, you said this a few times too and you've been talking about owned media on the show too where these owned media assets, they do a better job at kind of creating a full-funnel experience really where is with a paid ad where it's, here's a nice picture of the destination, a book now button, that is intended for a very small slice or segment of that audience that's actually who sees the ad, a very particular stage in the funnel where someone's happening to scroll Instagram. And they like, oh yeah, I've been meaning to book a trip today. Let me just do this right now. But by leveraging paid media there to boost the owned media making that call to action, hey, engage with this piece of content. It's just it's a lot more memorable and then all of a sudden they are in that full funnel where we're generating awareness of course, as they continue to engage with it. It's just a natural way for them to progress through the funnel instead of trying to capture somebody at that precise moment in time, which as we've been saying, once that opportunity is gone, it's gone. Or else you've got to pay for another impression. Adam Stoker: [00:15:13] Yeah, let's go to a conversation you and I have had many times and that's the difference between capturing existing demand and creating new demand because I actually I love the way paid media is currently being used to try to capture existing demand. I'm wondering if you would kind of walk through each of those types of demand for us and maybe why paid media still makes sense to capture existing demand. Jared Price: [00:15:39] Absolutely. So yeah, kind of the two, this is a very basic breakdown of course, but you can't capture that demand if it doesn't exist. These kinds of large-scale awareness efforts where you're creating really cool and compelling content that people want to watch regardless of the destination. It's just like, okay, this is something that I'm interested in. We can talk about that hey, you should visit us sometime in your life down the road. But that kind of content that's inherently digestible that people are interested in. Yeah, it's working to create that awareness there. And that demand and then actually when it comes time for somebody, when they're at a point in the decision-making process, hey, I want to book a trip or whatever that that call action is, or that specific action is. You then use the paid channels to reach out to that person or find them at the right time there. And so, just again, those two kind of different sides of the coin, but one doesn't come without the other and creating demand again, you've got to have that with any intent to capture it. Adam Stoker: [00:16:46] Yeah, if you're not creating demand, then eventually you're going to run out of existing demand, right? And so one of the things that and this kind of builds off of what you're saying is Google pay-per-click advertising, right? Google Ads. When somebody is searching keywords related to your destination, it is much more likely that they are prepared to book a trip than somebody that's scrolling on Instagram, right? So I look at that as capturing existing demand and using the traditional paid media methods that we've been using with a booking call to action, right? Those make sense. The argument that I think I want to make is I don't believe that a lot of the paid media campaigns that we're running on Instagram or on TikTok or wherever it is that we're running them. I don't think that they're generating new demand. Jared Price: [00:17:37] Yep. Adam Stoker: [00:17:37] I think we're just spending money and hoping that it creates demand. But with the way media is being consumed today, I don't think it's doing its job. Jared Price: [00:17:49] Absolutely. Well, when we get to the capturing demand stage, kind of what we were talking about earlier, it has to be very deliberate and thought out on the target audience to engage with something deliberately find it out and then go through the process of booking a trip there. Whereas it's an easier way, I guess to occupy some headspace there and potential in your audiences there where it's not being as overt as some of the traditional paid ads that we have been running. But just it's an easier way in there. And also it's a more holistic approach to the destination where people are able to get a much better and comprehensive look at the destination by again engaging with this cool content that you're creating instead of we keep using the example of here's a nice splash image of the destination, some cool copy there, but that's just a small portion of what the destination has to offer. But with this content and depending on how you want to create that, depending on your goals with your audience, it's a lot more natural even and less shoehorned into a specific way to have people eventually visit the destination. Adam Stoker: [00:18:57] Yeah, let's talk about a subtle change too that I think in how we're thinking about utilizing paid media. When I say use paid media to drive audience right to an asset that you've created, let's say a podcast. If you're running a static ad that says, listen to our podcast, you're trying to use the traditional approach to paid media to generate an audience and to generate engagement with your content. My suggestion is how about you find pieces of your content that seem to be most engaging. Slice it into a 30-second, 60-second, or 90-second video clip depending on the value of the content and use your paid budget to promote the content as opposed to just promoting an ad. You're giving them a bite-size piece of what the content is going to be and you're driving them to want to hear the whole story. So that subtle change of let's not just put like a static ad here and say, go download this podcast. Let's do a 30-second clip of the podcast. Let's slice it up into multiple ads sets and let's put a little bit of money behind that so that people want to go hear the whole story. I think that subtle change is the difference between looking at paid media the way we always have and using paid media the way it's working today. Jared Price: [00:20:15] I don't want to disclose my TikTok viewing hours or anything. But I think there's an element of that when you're presenting the content there instead of promoting just a hey come check this out. But I’m immediately invested in the story there or if it's something I'm interested in, that's a lot more appealing where it's like, okay, well, here's a slice of a story that my attention is grabbed there. There's an element of buying into it almost before you even make it to that next point of clicking through where again I keep mentioning that it's just a more natural way for people to start to be thinking about that destination where let's offer these little things, little snippets here, get people invested and then it comes to the point where we make the ask there. They tap the button or click wherever and kind of access that next level of content and engagement. Adam Stoker: [00:21:08] And it only works if the next level that you're talking about of content and engagement is actually good enough to capture them and make them want to continue to consume, right? So we're not saying, put a crappy podcast up there and then run a few ads and hope you're going to build an audience. Like you have to understand who the audience is, what they're looking for, and provide real tangible value to that audience through the podcast. I think that only comes from knowing your audience really well, which at this point, I think destinations should know their audiences really well. They're just not talking to them in the places or the ways that the audience wants to engage. Jared Price: [00:21:45] Yeah. And okay, so adding on to that, I feel like in addition to the audiences, I feel like anybody who either lives in a destination is kind of paying attention to their surroundings, but especially those people who are marketing it, they have an idea of the stories that they want to tell from their destination. It's like this is what people need to know about. So I think that by defining those stories, having the chance there to tell it instead of having another entity, you kind of own that story there getting on top of that saying, hey, this is our place and this is the way that we want to present that narrative. We know that this audience is going to be receptive to that and building around that. It's yeah, it just seems to be a more effective and almost intuitive approach to getting people engaged with a destination. Adam Stoker: [00:22:30] Yeah, I think you're spot on. Jared Price: [00:22:31] That’s first time I’ve heard that. Adam Stoker: [00:22:31] -- and going back to the sustainability. Yeah JP's never been spot on before. So this is big. Going back to the sustainability concept, I want to tie in a statement that I left out there earlier where I said that I felt like owned media in the Pezzo model was a blind spot for the industry. I also now feel like marketing it with a sustainable approach by using owned media has been a blind spot for sustainability. I want to tie those two together now and say if sustainability is important to us, we should be approaching our marketing budget from a sustainable perspective, which means there's no excuse for owned media to be overlooked anymore in a destination marketing plan. So as we talk about sustainability, one of the things that we found with COVID and I know you've done a little bit of research into some of the landscape that changed when COVID hit, what we found is that when travel goes to zero, if you don't have the assets to continue to engage the audience even when they're not coming to your destination, and let's say your budget is gone so you don't have the ability to create those new assets tomorrow, what do you do? Maybe this is where it makes sense for you to talk about a little bit of the research that you've done into content consumption and how it changed in COVID so that people can be prepared that if something else happens, what assets do I already need to have in place in order to continue to get engage our potential audience. Jared Price: [00:23:53] Yeah, and it seems obvious to say that the marketing landscape is consistently changing. But when something big like that happens, heaven forbid it happens again, knock on wood, all that stuff. But the way that media consumption habits changed during the pandemic obviously people were spending a lot more time just consuming content. We've said before that we think that COVID was perhaps the best thing to happen to TikTok. Adam Stoker: [00:24:17] And podcast for that matter. Jared Price: [00:24:24] And podcast. Exactly. Yeah. And I saw a breakdown of Gen Z, millennials, different generational demographics. Gen Z, I want to say it was 51% increase in engaging in video content. Like you were saying, podcasts became a lot more popular. Also we've touched on just a little bit too, but streaming services, subscriptions skyrocketed really. We've seen a couple of examples of destinations that are producing content to eventually be housed on these streaming services where when things end up changing, whether it's another world-changing event like a pandemic or even just signs of an economic recession, we need to be prepared for where people are going to be. And I think the trend indicates that people gravitate toward great content in that storytelling. Adam Stoker: [00:25:10] JP, I think you're spot on. Again, wow. Twice in one episode. Holy cow. Jared Price: [00:25:15] I’m writing this down. Adam Stoker: [00:25:15] No. The idea is that an event like COVID where people couldn't do the things that they normally could do, people couldn't work, people couldn't travel, people couldn't do all these things, they looked down at their phone and they consumed more content on their phone. So the question is, do you have enough content to be able to engage those people when they can't come to your destination even when they want to? Again, you mentioned it, we don't ever want something like that to happen again, but I can tell you that COVID exposed the unprepared. Jared Price: [00:25:45] Yep. Absolutely. And there was a lot of shifting and repositioning even kind of the core goals of destination marketing organizations. But the other thing with that, it's not like we're just creating owned media to be prepared for an event where people are spending more time on their phones. But if you are creating this content, this evergreen material that you are actively leveraging during the good times, it's a backup as well for when like, hey, we need content. Good thing we have this library built up that we can then people can find, we can distribute. Instead of all of a sudden being caught unprepared. And okay, we got to figure something out here to get people engaged and at least thinking about the destination. Adam Stoker: [00:26:29] Yeah, it's never fun trying to play catch up when you don't have what you need to tackle a situation. I want the takeaway for destinations who may be thinking, okay, I want to get into owned media. I want to understand how to do it. Let's talk about a couple of different things. First of all, one of the things that I'm seeing as I'm talking to destinations is a lot of them are talking to us about coming in alongside of their agency of record, allowing their agency of record to continue to focus on the initiatives that they've built. But to have our organization build an owned media strategy that can plug in seamlessly with what the agency of record is already doing, tell me a little bit about some of those conversations that you've been having and how that seems to be maybe the place that makes sense to operate with owned media. Jared Price: [00:27:19] Yeah, absolutely. I think that the simple fact of the matter too is that just by the very nature of being an organization that leverages public funds is that you've got stakeholders involved, you're involving government officials, different offices. It's a bureaucracy, of course. I know we've been talking about shifting approaches too, but I think there still are merits to that traditional way of advertising that I think they're not going to go away any time soon, especially if you get it to the point where you're setting up those metrics and it's working for you and your organization's goals. But owned media, I think this is another thing that I hear a lot when I'm speaking with marketing people across the industry, marketing professionals don't call them marketing people. Is that it seems really daunting from the get-go where this is definitely a long game here. It's not like we're going to spend all this money building a documentary or something like that all at once. But it's a matter of just starting to think about it, dipping your toes into the owned media approach, building up a bank of content, it doesn't have to happen overnight. And so, yeah, I think that's a unique way that we've been able to contribute to some of these owned media approaches where not disrupting a relationship with an agency of record, but coming in and supplementing that effort, so it works really well. Again, you just start small, ease into it helping you figure out, okay, well, here's the own media strategy, but also here's how that ties into those other marketing efforts that your agency is going to be leveraging regardless. Adam Stoker: [00:28:57] Well, we talked about at the beginning that we look at paid, earned, shared, and owned. Most of destinations are actually doing a pretty good job with their agency of paid, earned, and shared. Uprooting that to build an owned media strategy doesn't make hardly any sense. Jared Price: [00:29:14] There’ll be a transition. It's got to be a transition really. It's just another aspect of building that out. Adam Stoker: [00:29:19] We need to be nurturing all four, all four, paid, earned, shared, owned. And so what seems to be working is to for people that haven't been doing enough owned media to bring us in alongside the AOR, and to have everybody pushing in the same direction. The other thing that I wanted to talk about is budget-wise. I'm sure a lot of people have been listening to my podcast and have been wondering, okay, well, if I want to get into owned media, how should I think about percentage of budget to put towards owned media and things like that? This is where you and I have also talked a lot about it that I think larger destinations might have a little bit more leeway to dip their toe than smaller destinations. But I look at small destinations and I say, if you're sandwiched between two major destinations with larger budgets than you and yet you're using the same marketing strategy that they are to try to pull market share from those competitors, I think you're just trying to swim upstream against the current, right? Jared Price: [00:30:17] You can't buy relevance when you're just going toe to toe with some of these larger destinations because they're just going to outspend you every time. Adam Stoker: [00:30:23] Yeah, you cannot outspend those big competitors. And so where can you have a competitive advantage? And owned media, and I think Beaufort South Carolina is a great example of this. They're sandwiched between Hilton Head and Savannah and yet they've built a podcast of their own and it's caused them to really have a leg up on their competitors in that scenario. So I think for a smaller destination I would consider and by the way smaller destination, I would say if you're a million dollars or less of your total funding for your destination, a million dollars or less, I would probably suggest being in the 35% range. As I try to think about building out my own media strategy and putting 35% of my budget after all of my facilities and after all of my payroll costs and all that kind of stuff. With what's left, I would take 35% of that and I would really try to focus it on building owned media that can set you apart that doesn't require you to have as much paid media as your competitors. What do you think for medium destinations? Jared Price: [00:31:25] Yeah, I think for medium destinations where they do have a little bit more, I guess, firepower from a budgetary and paid media standpoint, I think we've discussed for perhaps between 20 and 25% where of course, as kind of the budget level scales, that budget number goes up, of course. But you've got a different set of circumstances that you're operating with and so yeah, 20 to 25% for a mid-sized destination, we found to be kind of the sweet spot there, especially when you're just getting started, getting things rolling. Adam Stoker: [00:31:58] Great. For larger destinations. And I'd actually have to defer to Stuart Butler who I had on the owned media series that I did on the show before. He said 10% is his recommendation. I actually think that makes a lot of sense for a large destination. Listen, everybody out there that's listening, you have to protect your job that's also a component of sustainability, right? Is your role in the organization has to be sustainable? So again, the suggestion is not go on in this year, make your stakeholders upset and lose your job. Right? Instead, it's start making some of the decisions that are going to make your marketing strategy more sustainable and then demonstrate wins over time to your stakeholders. Let's make sure that we as destination marketing organizations are transitioning with the marketing landscape as opposed to getting caught with our pants down using old strategies in a new world. Jared Price: [00:32:53] Absolutely. And I'm glad you brought that up too because treading lightly here, not trying to sound alarmist or falling down the slippery slope here, but just due to the nature of DMOs I think that there's just kind of a lack of understanding about the function that they play in a community. That budget is typically first on the chopping block here. I think is as we see efficiency decrease of paid media approaches or the traditional ones that we've been talking about, with those diminishing returns I think people are going to start asking even more questions. Like, we're spending all this money. Where's that going? Why do we have the DMO? Which it's a question that's already being asked, unfortunately. But again, I think it's just as the relevance of those tactics decreases, I think you could make the argument that the same thing is happening to DMOs at least to the eyes of stakeholders or newly elected officials who they want to make an impact when they get in there and say, well, this is a big budget. What are we getting for it? Again, it's just creating that content in those assets. It's going to go a long way as far as preserving just the standard structure of DMO. Adam Stoker: [00:34:00] And to your point, a lot of stakeholders, a lot of board members are members of outside organizations who actually have the ability to tie the advertising dollars that they spent to the actual revenue that they generate. They're going to be able to know that certain tactics are outdated and that we're falling behind. When they look at what we're doing from a destination marketing perspective, yes, we don't have the data to tie it together, but they do. And they're going to say what you're doing is antiquated at some point. So we have to evolve. Jared Price: [00:34:32] Exactly. Exactly. It's like, well in our minds, there's an equation here that's supposed to balance out as far as what we're spending, what we're getting in return. I think we have a hard time figuring that out anyway. We've got tools that we can get approximations. But yeah, I think people are going to start asking those kinds of questions where what does the math shake out to be? Are we just kind of, again, feeding the paid media machine here just because that's what we've been doing? But yeah, again, I think it's just a matter of being proactive and just shifting strategies, shifting strategies to accommodate this, it sounds cliche to say it. But this brave new world here. Adam Stoker: [00:35:07] I love it. Give me as a parting thought here. Your number one piece of advice. If you could simplify it and give it to our listeners, what would it be? Jared Price: [00:35:16] Don't be shy about telling the stories that you believe in and don't let somebody else tell that story. Own it. Adam, I know we talk a lot about touch points and being able to not necessarily control the narrative because I don't think that's even a possibility now in the internet of course. But being able to influence it strongly so that the people that you are trying to target, they catch that vision and creating content that surrounds that, it's just a great way to encapsulate that and get it in front of the right people. Adam Stoker: [00:35:50] Great. Well, if people want to learn more about you JP, what's the best way for them to do so? Jared Price: [00:35:54] Obviously, I'm not very good at telling my back story. Yeah, shoot me an email. jared@relicagency.com. Working on my autobiography. I'll send you a draft. But also we can talk owned media. Adam Stoker: [00:36:05] Awesome. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Jared Price: [00:36:07] Hey, thanks for having me. Adam Stoker: [00:36:08] Absolutely. And thanks everybody for listening. If you enjoyed today's episode, please don't forget to leave us a rating or a review. Helps us to continue to bring you amazing guests like JP. Jared Price: [00:36:18] Oh, yeah. Absolutely incredible. Adam Stoker: [00:36:20] Thanks everybody and have a great week. [End of Transcript]
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