National State Tourism Directors Mercury Awards > Broadcast Advertising: Television

Worth The Wait

About This Entry:

Minnesota’s highly-successful multi-year campaign has been inviting travelers to “Find Your True North” since 2018. More than a tagline, this is an idea built on the shared values of adventure, culture and curiosity; a powerful way to shine a light on the experiences that make Minnesota a place for self-discovery through destinations and the journey between them. Due to the extreme seasonality in the state, most creative is scouted, filmed, and produced one year in advance. Therefore, our winter campaign was planned and ready well in advance of the 2020 season. Then COVID hit, completely disrupting our planned campaign. To keep ourselves informed of the constantly changing circumstances, our team quickly developed a proprietary tool called the COVID-19 Scoring Model. This model allowed us to actively monitor varying COVID-19 levels across markets, ensuring responsible and responsive advertising. The model incorporated CDC data crossed with interest in MN (as measured by both real-time website data and Google Trends data). The tool heavily influenced our creative and media strategy ensuring we used our budget to support the right message in the right channels at the right time.

As winter approached, our model was showing a spike in COVID-19 cases, and a decrease in website activity/interest in Minnesota, so our team quickly regrouped to proactively discuss a new strategy focused on promoting future travel. Creatively, this meant developing messaging that would comfort and inspire potential visitors, keeping Minnesota top-of-mind as they dreamed about the possibilities of a liberated summer season. “Worth the Wait” encouraged travelers to look ahead and begin to plan their future trips. From a tactical perspective, we adjusted our media channels to an awareness-only approach that would reach more potential visitors instead of focusing on immediate on-site intent actions.

Campaign Strategy:

Knowing that our strategy was to promote a high level of awareness across a mass audience, broadcast naturally fit as a channel. We targeted regional markets with a higher propensity to visit Minnesota due to close proximity. In order to tell our full story, we produced three COVID-19 recovery spots that ran alongside our primary Find Your True North campaign. Each of these spots had a slightly different focus, from initial recovery, supporting MN travel and hospitality businesses, and inspiring future travel.

We diversified our broadcast strategy by using both network and cable channels. For network TV, we focused our strategy on programs that our target markets consumed in real-time to ensure the least amount of ad skipping such as live news and sports. Our partnership with the Minnesota Broadcaster’s Association let us effectively cover MN in order to allow us to push dollars outside the state as well.

For cable, we researched the programs our target audiences of Cultural Explorers and Spontaneous Adventurers were most likely to watch, such as Food Network and National Geographic.

Knowing that broadcast never lives within a vacuum, we supported our broadcast buy with a variety of digital tactics including online video, paid social video, and CTV/OTT in order to broaden our reach to light TV viewers and increase the frequency of our touch points.

Results:

First and foremost, our buying strategy and negotiation allowed us to achieve a cost-per-point that was 18% more efficient than our initial planning costs, leading to more TRPs in our key markets. Due to this additional broadcast, our campaign exceeded our reach/frequency benchmarks, reaching an average of 39% of each of our DMAs with an average frequency of 3.4x (original goal of 33%/2x).

Not only was our buying more efficient, but both organic search and direct traffic (elements we would expect to be impacted by broadcast) saw increases during our broadcast period compared to the previous period of +8% and +9% respectively. Paid Search was up 13% period over period (even when accounting for differences in spend), particularly driven by branded keywords, which then dropped by 2% the period after broadcast ended.

Why This Is A Finalist: 

I really like the concept of the "COVID-19 Scoring Model" and how it was used responsibly to advertise Minnesota and then, working right in tandem, the three different types of commercials they released to the public.

I think how they catered to their target audience was really neat with regards to broadcasting TV. And how their partnership with the Minnesota Broadcaster's Association helped them.