The Amelia Island Convention & Visitors Bureau attracted winter-stricken northeastern consumers to its vacation destination with a geo-targeted mobile campaign that was keyed to local weather data in the targeted audiences' location.
Objective:
In December 2021, the Amelia Island Convention & Visitors Bureau (AICVB) launched its winter campaign with a goal to engage leisure travelers in key northeast markets. The campaign presented Amelia Island, Florida as an escape to warm beaches and sunny days from harsh winter weather.
AICVB's challenge was to entice travelers stuck in the cold to book a getaway to Amelia Island. While it is easy to appeal to people dealing with winter weather, it is another thing to get people to commit to actual vacation bookings. So, to drive bookings, AICVB created an interactive weather-reliant mobile campaign based on its audience's core behaviors.
Checking the weather is a daily staple in the majority of people's routines, especially during the winter months. People have gone from getting the weather via the radio, to local news, and now to the tap of an app on their phones. According to eMarketer, the weather app that is native to iPhone devices has over 91 million unique visitors per month in the U.S., which is more visitors than Instagram, Spotify, and TikTok see over the same period. Checking the weather on a mobile device is often the first thing people do in the morning. Their phones serve as the starting point for the day, functioning as a companion throughout the day as users look for information and seek moments of escape.
Weather is synonymous with location. Without accurate location data, weather forecasts and alerts would be meaningless, and AICVB's 2022 winter campaign would not have led to such effective business results had it not been able to leverage this data.
Target Audience:
AICVB's target audience was "Leisure Consumers." Within Leisure Consumers, AICVB had three segments that it identified via segment design and persona mapping.
Creative Strategy:
AICVB's strategy was to deploy a weather-triggered mobile campaign reliant on location data to power custom rich media units. These units were to be juxtaposed with the warm luxuries Amelia Island had to offer, which contrasted with the winter conditions its core audience was facing at home.
AICVB set out to reach these would-be travelers on their smartphones, where they were seeking little escapes throughout their day that mirrored the larger escape that AICVB was encouraging them to take.
Using paid media, AICVB ran the high-impact creative via a geo-targeted campaign focused on the northeast across contextually relevant sites (related to travel, food, lifestyle, and parents and family) and content (searched with keywords such as "beach," "vacation," "island," "spring break," and "winter blues") to reach the campaign's three personas and inspire action.
AICVB's strategy was innovative in that throughout the campaign flight AICVB ran general brand creative; however, when the weather dipped below a certain threshold in each market, the general assets went dark and the contextual, weather-related assets took center stage. Together, the creative and media offered the perfect blend of left-brain tactics (pinpointed targeting and weather-triggered automation) and right-brain tactics (high-impact, scroll-stopping creative) to intercept the target audience in a key mindset to drive bookings for Amelia Island.
Context:
This was the second year PadSquad worked with Starmark and the Amelia Island Convention & Visitors Bureau on their winter campaign. Based on past learnings, the target audience and strategy evolved from key loyalist and prospect markets to a weather-triggered approach across northeastern states to gauge the impact that weather has on booking travel. The new approach proved effective, generating engagement rates nearly four points higher than the previous winter.
Overall Campaign Execution:
To reach leisure travelers and engage them to book a trip to Amelia Island, AICVB leveraged high-impact rich media creative with weather-triggered targeting to showcase Amelia Island's beaches, accommodations, dining options, and lifestyle.
AICVB served customized creative to match the customer's mindset and local weather environment. This approach dynamically changed the messaging based on current weather conditions in the customer's location to make the creative experience relevant and more enticing to the viewer. The bespoke rich media assets leveraged an API feed from The Weather Channel to serve up the most relevant messaging to the consumer.
AICVB focused its weather-triggered campaign on mobile devices in New York, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and Boston. When temperatures in each location got cold, the campaign's regular brand creative switched off, and the weather-triggered creative activated to reach consumers in the right mindset.
Two custom weather-triggered mobile creative units were developed for this campaign. The "wintertude" unit featured a blustery winter scene with a rain umbrella that turned into a beach umbrella on Amelia Island. This unit leveraged location and weather data to interrupt the current "cold front with a change in wintertude" by serving up a sunny four-day outlook and agenda for the viewer's visit to Amelia Island.
The "It's Still Sunny Somewhere" unit featured an interactive ice scraper that removed a frosted screen to reveal what awaited chilly northerners if they escaped to Amelia Island. A "Tap to Escape" button drove travelers directly to appealing accommodation options on the island for easy booking.
Mobile Execution:
Mobile sat at the heart of the campaign with 100 percent of the budget going toward running dynamic ads across mobile devices in key states at key moments. Mobile was central to the strategy and execution because the majority of consumers check the weather on their phones throughout the day.
With weather being key to the campaign, mobile needed to be, too. The API that AICVB used from The Weather Channel was reliant on mobile data. While weather data can be pulled from desktops, doing so can pull users' location data from as far as several states over from where they actually are because of IP addresses and other factors. Mobile location data is simply more accurate.
Smartphones are also the platform consumers use to take breaks and find mini escapes throughout their day — the exact behavior that AICVB was trying to target in encouraging people to escape the cold and book vacations to Amelia Island. Running ads across mobile was more closely aligned with the mindset that AICVB was trying to target, whereas desktop computers are more associated with a work mindset.
The Amelia Island winter campaign proved to be successful at leveraging location to reach leisure travelers in the right weather mindset in order to drive bookings. The campaign exceeded AICVB's benchmarks across every metric, generating an overall engagement rate that was five times higher than the set benchmark.
The weather-triggered units delivered a 10.9 percent engagement rate, more than double AICVB's benchmark of 2 to 4 percent. It even turned out that snow-inducing temperatures weren't necessary to prompt northerners to engage and book trips. The units that were served between 45 and 50 degrees were enough to convince travelers to explore Amelia Island. It didn't take much convincing, though, because as soon as the weather dipped to colder temperatures, northerners were already looking for an escape. These units garnered a 9.29 percent engagement rate, versus the units served when temperatures reached 40 degrees and below, which saw engagement rates of 4.69 percent.
Beyond blowing away media metrics, the campaign was also successful at generating business results for AICVB. "This program utilized innovative weather-triggered technology and evocative creative to deliver an effective advertising campaign that out-delivered our expectations and helped set records for visitation in Q1 and Q2," said Amy Boek, Chief Marketing Officer. The weather-triggered approach targeting northeastern states proved to be effective as Q1 2022 visitation from this region increased nearly 60 percent compared to Q1 2021.
