As my next #The100DayProject, I'll be posting 100 days of what I've learned from Destination Marketing Organization (DMO)/Agency RFP processes, projects, and relationships. If you work at a DMO or an agency that works with DMOs, hopefully some of these will be knowledge you can use.
The interactive world is changing, and I didn’t want to be changed – I wanted to be the change. In seeing The Forest For The Trees, I get to combine everything I love with the ability to learn to love again.
For those in the creative industries (like design, branding, interactive, and marketing), the freelance life of flexibility, freedom, and responsibility are waiting to be grasped, should you choose. Which means clients will have an increasing number of considerations and options, should they choose. And agencies, dealing with a changing workforce and client desires, will need to adapt, should they choose.
How can DMOs and CVBs provide more value for members than just creating multi-page lists of businesses and directing site visitors to member pages within the DMO's site? By focusing on being content publishers and relationship makers, not resource aggregators.
With travel being one of the greatest adventures we can experience, much of my work with Adventure Brands has been in the travel and tourism industry. Travel and tourism is a huge generator of jobs and revenue in the United States – in 2014, $927.9 billion was spent directly by domestic and international travelers, and travel supports 8 million direct tourism jobs and 7 million indirect and induced jobs. When these numbers are distributed to Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) and Convention and Visitors Bureaus (CVBs) across the U.S., the responsibilities that interactive, advertising, and marketing agencies have to these communities are huge.
Experiences are created through interactions with a destination, not through a listing page that shows every restaurant. Stories are written and memories are created from the experiences people have, not from pages of search results. So what role must DMOs play in order to be more than simply lists of resources?
"Only twenty-five percent of American respondents in a recent Ernst & Young study said that brand loyalty affected how they shopped. For established brands, this is a nightmare. You can never coast on past performance ... and the price premium that a recognized brand can charge has shrunk." – James Surowiecki, from "Twilight of the Brands" in the New Yorker