National State Tourism Directors Mercury Awards > Special Projects

Laugh Tracker

About This Entry:

We were tasked with inspiring the lucrative family travel market to choose Tennessee for their family vacation
destination. Our objectives were to efficiently drive interest and travel to Tennessee. Our goals, based off historical
performance, were to drive over 1.3 million hotel and flight searches, increase hotel demand by 3.8% YOY to
exceed the previous year’s growth, and generate a $100:$1 ROAS.

Once we dug into some research, we found that online reviews impact 93% of travel decisions, but millions of them
are purchased, fabricated or fake. With so many resources providing conflicting and subjective opinions on family friendly destinations, moms (the primary vacation planners) don’t know what to believe and are unsure if they are
making the right choices. They want to plan the perfect vacation to create memories and most importantly see their
kids laugh and smile. Laughter is considered a visual expression of joy, mirth and happiness. This led to our
insight: As a parent, you want nothing more than to hear your kids laugh, because it’s proof they are happy.

To eliminate the subjectivity of travel reviews, we identified an entirely new metric to rate travel experiences —
laughter. And we didn’t just show parents that kids have fun there, we proved it by inventing a first-of-its-kind
wearable device that measures laughter and excitement to determine how much fun kids have in Tennessee.
Equipped with a microphone, GPS technology and cloud computing, the device records audio samples in 10-
second increments and sends them to a neural network that is home to a dataset of 214,000- plus audio files. AI
software uses machine learning to determine if a sound is laughter. We concurrently captured heart rate data to
measure excitement. We visited 31 family- friendly attractions across the state of Tennessee to collect data from
hundreds of kids of various ages and developed a scale for rating the level of laughter and excitement by age at
each of the locations. Using the GPS location data, we also were able to identify specific activities within the
attractions that generated the most laughter and excitement by age.

Campaign Strategy:

We analyzed more than 2 million data points, recorded more than 1.6 million seconds of laughter, and detected
53,433 moments of excitement. We also developed a scale for rating the level of laughter and excitement by age
at each of the locations. With all of this data, we developed a custom experience on Tennessee's brand site to
create a planning tool for moms, showcasing the data collected, heat maps showing where the kids had most fun
and attraction reviews directly from kids. To make planning easier, users were able to filter the data by age range
because we understand that what a 2- year- old may like, an 8- year- old may not. We wanted to reach moms in the
places they are looking for family travel inspiration. Video, display, social and out- of- home assets ripe with the new
data were leveraged to drive moms to our planning tool. We leveraged Pinterest as a key platform for this
campaign because we know moms are using the platform throughout the entire trip- planning process. We were the
first travel brand to tap into some unique features of the platform, like tried- its, which are traditionally used for food
and recipe content, to provide further information and utility to this engaged audience.

Results:

Using the power of laughter, the campaign exceeded all our goals by creating a connection with moms and
inspiring them to choose Tennessee for their family vacation. The campaign influenced over 5.9 million hotel and
flight searches (354% above goal), increased hotel demand by 4.2% following the campaign (11% above goal),
and generated a $142:$1 return on ad spend ($42 above goal). Individual attractions across Tennessee are also
leveraging the Laugh Tracker data to enhance their offerings. So not only did we show that Tennessee is fun, we’re
also helping to make it even more fun in the future. To promote this campaign, the media budget as $427,500
across all mediums.

Why This Is A Finalist: 

Visionary. Forward-thinking. Smart way to integrate technology with human behavior and buying habits.

You had me at Laughter. GREAT campaign with innovative execution. Way to combine a little science, (STEM), creativity, family fun, hard work on an awesome campaign.

SOOOO innovative... not just capturing laughter, but measuring it and using resulting response to drive measurable return.