National State Tourism Directors Mercury Awards > Industry and Strategic Partnerships

Crush Friday

About This Entry:

The Virginia Tourism Corporation developed a multi-level co-op program to encourage the millennial work martyr to stop losing their unused vacation days.

More than half of American workers don’t use all of their vacation time. The main offenders? Millennials, who feared taking a vacation for lack of time and budget. Virginia Tourism Corporation knew they had to do something different to get their attention.

The goal of our co-op plan was to partner with 20 of our most active DMOs to change this mindset. We focused our efforts to one of our top markets, Washington D.C. and the surrounding Northern Virginia area, which also happens to be the most under-vacationed area in the nation. We wanted to show them how much better their Fridays could be if they simply took a day off and spent it in Virginia.

Our plan of attack was to develop a new model for co-op advertising that would recruit DMOs to partner in a fully integrated campaign. We designed the creative around non gender or racial specific stick figures. Yes, stick figures, with fun images and a quirky unexpected tone to cut through the clutter of a typical tourism campaign.
We shared all of our campaign assets via our turn-key Crush Friday toolkit with any DMO that became a partner in the co-op. The toolkit gave our partners an instant campaign with turn-key and customizable creative including TV, radio, video, banner ads, direct mail, images and vector stick figures.

Whether it was fist-bumping a bald eagle on the Appalachian Trail, pounding oysters with an otter in the River Realm or riding a dolphin into the sunrise off the Eastern Shore, our army of stick figures not only invited our target audience for cool adventures, but also educated them on how they would actually be better employees by simply taking one day off.

Our co-op goal was to attract 20 of our most active DMO partners, while also increasing awareness of tourism product, and getting more people to Virginia.

Campaign Strategy:

VTC worked with students at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Brandcenter to develop strategic directions that would help Millennials understand the importance of taking time off. We also worked with agency partners Elevation and The Martin Agency to bring the CRUSH FRIDAY campaign to life across creative, owned, earned, and paid media.

To evaluate the success of the campaign we would measure 1) the adoption and involvement from VTC’s travel industry partners, and 2) the performance of the Crush Friday campaign’s shared KPIs.

The foundation of the campaign was digital and video, where we developed creative assets tied to each of the Virginia is for Lovers sub-brands. These assets featured a team of stick figures to appeal to millennials without limiting ourselves to specific casting or talent. These quirky characters told our audience that they shouldn’t be at work—they should be doing over-the-top amazing things in Virginia.

A single, high-energy, thirty-second video drove the point home. We created “Friday” personas, doing all the things that you can do in Virginia. Without saying a single word for the first 20 seconds of the video, we were able to represent everything from wine and beer to music and mountain biking, and do it in a way that makes Millennials say, “I want to go there and do that!”

Broadcast spots, streaming radio, and live read scripts provided further “air support” for the CRUSH FRIDAY message, and articles about the campaign appeared on blogs, social media, news outlets, and editorial across Virginia and D.C.

As part of the campaign we created Crush Friday mini vacation guides. Each month our Crush Friday team traveled to a different partner destination to experience and create a Crush Friday itinerary. A subsequent Insta-story linked to the partners and the featured blog post.

Virginia DMO’s were introduced to Crush Friday co-op campaign at Virginia Governor’s Conference on Tourism and encouraged to join the effort by visiting the Crush Friday partner toolkit at vatc.org, VTC’s industry website. There they could download the campaign toolkit to promote their own regions as destinations for millennials to Crush Friday.

Results:

We hoped to attract 20 DMO partners. We landed 35 highly involved DMO partners. Of these 35, each brought their own local partners tallying more than 180 partners across the state and exceeding 200 total partners for the campaign.

Partners were highly engaged using the stick figures on their own images, developing passport programs, events and creating their own content all utilizing Crush Friday. Many partners are still using the campaign assets as their own even after the official co-op campaign has ended.

Crush Friday also crushed every awareness goal generating more than 67 million impressions through digital, programmatic, direct mail, PR and social. Thanks to the cornerstone video being on every partner website it received over 1MM views on YouTube, making it the highest viewed digital execution in the organization’s history. This was done with partner contributions of $250,000 along with our $200,000 media budget.

Our Pandora and programmatic banner ads had an average conversion rate of .88, two times higher than the campaign benchmark. Digital, Instagram, Facebook and twitter from VTC and partners generated more than 50 million impressions. Our Crush Friday Insta-stories produced the highest story engagement to date, 2367 location click views and 3871 partner account clicks.

Crush Friday blogs showcased 12 destinations and over 500 local partners throughout the year. Traffic to the blog in the target area was up by 18%. Website page views exceeded the goal with 104,401 page views. Even more impressive, our time on page for Crush Friday blogs was twice as long as traditional posts.

Our ROI study showed those who were aware of the Crush Friday campaign, 76% would be either very or extremely likely to visit Virginia. To top it off Virginia’s vacation day usage rose to 18.9 days used and was the top state in the nation for using those days to actually travel.

It turns out little stick figures can have a big impact.

Why This Is A Finalist: 

This campaign was a great project, aiming to help solve a problem most people have with not taking vacation days, and providing them a "close by" solution! Judges felt using the stick figures helped to give creativity to each of the DMOs. This was a well-laid out concept, with specific objectives and goals. Judges felt the campaign had a clear target market, i.e., the group of millennials who feared taking a vacation for lack of time and budget in the markets of Washington, D.C. and the surrounding Northern Virginia area. The campaign was innovative in who they targeted and why, and they exceeded the goals they had for signing up their program partners. Judges loved the partnership with university students, and the creative content—Virginia Tourism Corporation crushed it!