Destinations Council Destiny Awards > Social Media Campaign

Visit Anaheim

Bringing Big Anaheim Flavor to Tiny Screens

About This Entry:

Anchored by the “Happiest Place on Earth” and the West Coast’s largest convention center, Anaheim has an established reputation as a popular family-friendly destination for vacationers as well as business travelers from around the world. Over the last five years, the city has been experiencing a rapid evolution, welcoming many exciting developments around town including a significant number of new hotels, a revitalized downtown neighborhood, innovative culinary concepts and a booming brewery scene that would appeal to so many ... if they only knew about it.

As the destination marketing organization of Anaheim and Garden Grove, Visit Anaheim is charged with bringing leisure visitors and convention business to the city. Studies conducted by Visit Anaheim showed Anaheim lost convention business and leisure travelers with intent to travel due to a perception issue – that Anaheim had minimal to non-existent nightlife and authentic dining options. To change that perception and positively impact the local economy, Visit Anaheim needed to get the word out there is more to Anaheim than one might think. And the best way to effectively communicate that message was to show, not tell.

Visit Anaheim set out to design an integrated campaign to change the perception and narrative through a series of delicious, energetic, bite-sized videos in partnership with online content publisher FOODBEAST to show – indeed – Anaheim does have some flavor!

Campaign Strategy:

Visit Anaheim partnered with FOODBEAST, a cutting-edge, entertaining food-centric content publisher based in neighboring Santa Ana to create an extensive library of evergreen, bite-size videos. As an overarching distribution channel, FOODBEAST gave Visit Anaheim access to an established audience of millions of food-focused consumers that crave authentic travel experiences beyond the crowds of popular tourist attractions.

From Aug. to Dec. of 2016, 18 videos would highlight the diverse selection of dining options, six vastly different Anaheim and Garden Grove restaurants were selected to showcase six unique culinary experiences, producing a total of 12 videos. Visit Anaheim also highlighted the city’s burgeoning craft brew scene in five video vignettes to reinforce additional nightlife options. The last component of the campaign was a five-minute long news focused mini-documentary to tell a deeper story on how Anaheim is becoming a craft beer destination.

During the culinary portion of the campaign, six restaurants were chosen to be featured in two videos. The first video would highlight a fan-favorite menu item, while the second video would feature a creation created specifically for the video series. The new menu item would available to restaurant patrons through the duration of the campaign. The five craft beer videos would showcase a type of brew that popularized each local craft brewery. To increase local and national exposure, Visit Anaheim and FOODBEAST tied each video launch to a specific national “food and beer holidays.”

To promote the greater campaign and each video of the 18-part series, the team set out to achieve the following objectives:
• Objective 1: Enhance consumer and meeting planner’s perception of Anaheim’s dining and craft beer scene by generating 1 million digital impressions.
• Objective 2: Leverage FOODBEAST’s built-in audience to highlight Anaheim and Garden Grove as a foodie destination.
• Objective 3: Maximize the reach of each video by utilizing tongue-and-cheek “food holidays” to provide additional opportunities beyond owned digital channels.

The team will measure the campaign through social media impressions, views, engagements, shares, additional syndication of the content on noteworthy social media channels and traditional media coverage.

Results:

To ensure the videos reached the largest audience, Visit Anaheim and FOODEAST employed specific tactics to promote the video series beyond its social channels. To build initial interest, FOODBEAST provided ‘behind the scenes’ exclusives and video teases to their Snapchat followers. Diving deeper into the story, FOODBEAST’s writers debuted a video-specific article on the front page of FOODBEAST.com. Visit Anaheim seeded the videos and canned social messages to tourism partners, stakeholders and community advocates and the team designed and sent a beer-centric mailer to national beer writers which included a selection of Anaheim beers, branded steins, beer map and the videos

This campaign became the most successful digital campaign for Visit Anaheim. The videos exposed millions of potential visitors to Anaheim and Garden Grove’s burgeoning dining and craft brew scene while exceeding objectives:
• Objective 1: Over 30 million social impressions, 4.6 million campaign views and 1.9 million social engagements.
• Objective 2: Achieved through FOODBEAST articles and syndications on renowned pages like Epicurious, Liqour.com, Craftbeer.com, Chef Fanatic and Food Panda.
• Objective 3: Coverage was including in national publication roundups like The Huffington Post, LOCALE Magazine, Eater Los Angeles and CraftBeer.com.
Post-campaign, Visit Anaheim reviewed user comments, in addition to circulating a survey to gauge campaign impact. Consumer comments were overwhelming positive and business’ surveyed indicated an increase in foot traffic, awareness and sales after the video series.

Why This Is A Finalist: 

Overall, this was an excellent campaign. The business challenges were clearly outlined, and there was a clear description of the research and results. Visit Anaheim developed a campaign that tackled these challenges head-on. They executed well, and really highlighted key things that would pique someone's interest to visit, based on the feedback they received—not having a nightlife scene or good food. The partnership with Foodbeast was a good solution. The new menu item is a cool twist to keep the campaign talked about locally, and was a clever, innovative tactic. The choice of the "foodie" scene is interesting as well, as it's trendy and something that many tourists say they focus on. The creative was quality, and was well-shot and well-edited.

Post-campaign results were extremely successful with over 30 million social impressions, 4.6 million campaign views and 1.9 million social engagements. Consumer comments to videos were positive and business’ surveyed indicated an increase in foot traffic, awareness and sales.