Creating Awesome Sauce
A case study on how a well-executed creative campaign delivered big results for one our clients
We’re not very good at shouting out how awesome our work is (we’re also really bad at keeping sauce off our shirts). BUT, when you have a blast developing an ad campaign for an awesome client, and then find out it’s producing awesome results for said client, well...it’s in the ‘awesome sauce’ handbook that you must share the story with the world (and this kind of sauce is ok to leave on your shirt).
What We Did
Our work with the Spartanburg Convention & Visitors Bureau began with concepting, designing and producing a fun, multi-channel tourism campaign to help increase awareness. The client wanted to take a negative – that nobody thinks about Spartanburg – and turn it into a positive. The hope was that event planners and businesses might consider Spartanburg as a viable destination for their events.
Our answer was to poke some fun at the name. Our creative director, Christopher Cecil (who grew up in Spartanburg) said this of the campaign idea: “During one of several brainstorming sessions, we staged a mock argument...where one person’s role was to wave off Spartanburg while the other was to defend it. What happened was pretty hilarious. The exchange went something like ‘Well, I’ve never heard of Spartanburg. Who wants to have an event in a place called Spartanburg?’ To which the response was ‘Spartanburg? More like....more like....we're-totally-awesome-burg’. We all laughed and then looked at each other...that was the answer.”
The result is a series of ads that plays on the name while incorporating the necessary editorial content.
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The Results
Recently, the research pros at H2R Market Research conducted a Marketing & Media Campaign Analysis on behalf of the CVB to see how their marketing efforts were paying off. What they found was pretty sweet: the campaign is generating record engagement among travelers.
Turns out that tourists really like what Spartanburg has to say. Respondents reported that ads ‘make Spartanburg seem more appealing’. In fact, four out of five travelers surveyed were complimentary of the ‘more like…’ ads. As for the fifth guy? Well, maybe he’s the type who leaves one star restaurant reviews because he saw a fly in the parking lot. But we digress...
Chris Jennings, Executive Vice President of the CVB, said this of the survey results: “We have been seeing a significant increase in leisure travel to Spartanburg in the past few years, and our marketing efforts are paying off.”
Jennings also recently shared this about SLANT, “The CVB had tried various agencies to implement our tourism action plan, but marketing efforts never resonated with the public - until we hired SLANT. They provided us with a focused plan and developed ad campaigns that produced memorable creative and record engagement.”
To summarize: the research shows how our campaign helped generate $17.4 million in incremental travel revenue. And that’s something the CVB, the Spartanburg Chamber, and SLANT (and let’s be honest...our Moms) can really be proud of.
More Like “time-for-an-infographic-burg”
Record engagement was just one of the pieces of good news from the research study. Here are a few other nuggets we were happy to see in the report:
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Statistics interpreted from H2R Market Research & Spartanburg CVB
Call Us, Maybe
To sum it up, we love this kind of stuff. Using our creative brains along with our strategic brains to help our clients do more business? This is our awesome sauce.
Does your brand need a boost in visibility like this? If so, here’s our number...call us, maybe (don’t pretend you’re not singing this song in your head right now).