National State Tourism Directors Mercury Awards > Branding and Integrated Marketing Campaign: State Marketing Budget More Than $10 Million

Oregon, Only Slightly Exaggerated

About This Entry:

Oregon is a state known for its unrivaled natural beauty. However, being located near states like Wyoming, Utah and Montana that are also known as havens for outdoor adventure and scenic beauty, Oregon needed to stand out. To accomplish this, Travel Oregon created a groundbreaking animated campaign: “Oregon, Only Slightly Exaggerated” (OSE). The animation evoked what photography sometimes cannot – the magical feeling of being in Oregon. Rather than developing a checklist of places to visit, the campaign captured the emotional experience of actually visiting.

Through the OSE campaign, Travel Oregon inspired individuals to come find happiness off the beaten path, all over Oregon. Travel Oregon developed a :90 second animated video with an original score composed by the Grammy-nominated Oregon Symphony entitled “The Magic of Oregon.” The video featured stunning Oregon landscapes, exciting activities, a compilation of whimsical creatures, and people that showcased Oregon’s diverse population. The campaign highlighted Oregon in hand-crafted detail from real life locations to native plants and animals like the Columbia white tailed deer and the Western Meadowlark.

Animation was a powerful way to stir a visceral, emotional reaction with Travel Oregon’s audience and awaken a sense of wonder and magic often lost in today’s culture. The target audience for this campaign was the “active adventurer” (which was defined as a group that seeks action, loves animals, likes nature, and is foodie focused) in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Phoenix. Travel Oregon leveraged OSE to drive trips and reach its target by showing Oregon as the much-needed solution and respite from the craziness of daily life. The campaign was based on the simple truth: Getting into nature makes you feel better. Oregon is the answer.

Campaign Strategy:

Travel Oregon developed OSE with award-winning ad agency Wieden+Kennedy. The campaign featured beautiful animation showcasing Oregon’s real-life destinations and the people in it. A core tenant of this campaign, and ongoing work of Travel Oregon, is to make Oregon feel welcome to all. To achieve this, Travel Oregon partnered with organizations focused on diversity and inclusion in the outdoors to understand how diverse audiences would see themselves in the creative.

Travel Oregon created opportunities to showcase that the inspirational imagery from the campaign was grounded in real-life places and experiences, and these places must be experienced to fully grasp the magical feeling they induce.

Web: On traveloregon.com, a parallax hub page took visitors on a journey through Oregon with animations and calls-to-action (CTAs). The scenes and CTAs linked to deeper content including trip ideas that connected the real places with the campaign creative.

Social media: Travel Oregon launched the creative across all channels, and key performance indicators (KPIs) were video views, clicks to TravelOregon.com, and engagement. Images from the campaign were juxtaposed with the real locations that inspired them as well as trip ideas featuring the locations. 13 influencers were also sent across Oregon to showcase the real activities and destinations from the campaign.

Paid Media: The campaign raised awareness of Oregon and its offerings through large creative canvases and impactful video. It sparked curiosity through custom content partnerships and drove vacation planning through travel-intent targeting and online travel agent partnerships. A buy with AdTheorent featured an engaging media interstitial that revealed corresponding real-life photos of the animated scenes.

PR: Prior to the campaign’s launch, Travel Oregon hosted Portland media for interviews and an exclusive preview of the video. Launch was covered by all of Portland’s major broadcast stations resulting in 27 television broadcast and radio segments.

Posters: Seven movie-size posters (one poster for each of Oregon’s seven tourism regions) were made and distributed at corresponding locations. This strategy inspired visitors to travel the state to collect all seven limited-edition posters.

Felted Characters: Locally hand-made felted versions of characters from OSE were teased on social media to generate engagement.

Results:

With a budget of $4.2 million, OSE instantly went viral and was a tremendous success across all channels. Television exceeded the goal by 18% with 56 million impressions. Cinema exceeded the goal by 455K impressions for 2.4 million impressions surrounding blockbusters like Black Panther.

Social results were off the charts, and the :90 second video was the most engaging content in Travel Oregon social history.
-Paid distribution of the video received 1,130,890 views with a cost per view of $.01. This exceeded the goal by 590,890 views.
-Facebook: The viral nature of the video resulted in organic views that delivered 92% of overall reach. 85% of reach was organic which was unprecedented in today’s pay-to-play market.
-Instagram: 13 influencer tours resulted in 619,333 impressions.
-Twitter: Engagement was over 50%, while typical average is 3-8%. OSE also caught the eye of big names including Olympic Champion Ashton Eaton who tweeted at Travel Oregon.
-Click Ads received an astounding 69,202 clicks.

Traveloregon.com experienced the most website traffic ever generated by a campaign with overall sessions up 40% and page views up 120%, for 1.2 million total visits.

OSE was a massive PR success with 154 media placements with circulation of 479.5 million. The campaign resulted in a 243.9% increase in story numbers and a 97% increase in circulation over Travel Oregon’s previous campaign, which was its biggest campaign success to date. But it was the publications that covered the campaign that stood out. It isn’t every day that Entertainment Weekly, Huffington Post, Lonely Planet, and USA Today cover tourism advertising campaigns.

•The :90 second video generated 10.7 million views worldwide with a video completion rate (VCR) of 94.7%, which was higher than industry benchmarks (78.2%)
•Display: Average click-through-rate (CTR) for partners was 0.40%, which beat the industry average (0.10%)
•Custom Content: Partnerships with Atlas Obscura and Thrillist produced over one million views and 4.4K clicks.
•Online Travel Agent: Sojern earned 597K views with a 99.1% VCR (above benchmark of 90%).
•Out of Home (OOH) delivered 70 million impressions featuring creative in wallscapes, bulletins, transit shelters, and posters.

Why This Is A Finalist: 

Judges felt this campaign was brilliant! It was beautifully crafted and wonderfully differentiating. It was successful because it doesn’t appeal to everyone—quite the opposite. Because it's appealing to only those people who identify with the style of the campaign, a style is authentically representative of the spirit of Oregon. The campaign reimagines what destination advertising can be. Judges felt the results speak for themselves—awesome!