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* Transcript: Adam Stoker: [00:00:01]: Hey, everybody. I'm really excited for you to hear this episode. It's a little different than our standard episode that we do. We have a new show that we've created here and a lot of you may not know this, but we have two sides of our organization. We have Relic, and Relic is the organization that works specifically with tourism destinations and other tourism-related organizations all over the country. And then EKR is an agency that we own that works with non-tourism brands and helps them with a variety of different tactics similar to what we do for Destinations at Relic. And on the EKR side of the business, we've launched a new show called Brands and Campaigns. And the cool thing about this show is one of the, actually two of the episodes feature, Visit Myrtle Beach and some of the work that they've done at Myrtle Beach. This show is designed, it's called Brands and Campaigns. And this show is designed to analyze some of the most interesting campaigns that are out there in the world. Why did they do it? What was the strategy behind it? Who were they trying to target and how effective was it? We analyze that. And so the first thing that happens is a conversation with someone from either the agency that created it or the actual organization who was a part of the campaign or was featured in the campaign. And then there's a follow-up discussion where a couple of members of our team will analyze that discussion, analyze the campaign, and kind of give our verdict on how we feel about the, whether it's the quality of the campaign, the strategy behind it. Was it a success? Why was it a success? I think it will be a really interesting change of pace for you all as you've been listening to the show and what you're going to hear on this episode is first, Stuart Butler from Visit Myrtle Beach and Camden Bernatz's our creative director discussing the Mitarry Best Campaign. And you'll hear what it is. But the Mitarry Best Campaign is the first campaign that I've ever seen that was entirely generated by AI. And it came out with some really funny components and aspects to it, but the team just ran with it, Visit Myrtle Beach, just ran with it. And so you're about to hear the story behind the Mitarry Best Campaign. And then of course, on the back end, you'll hear the analysis of me and Camden discussing the success or failure of that campaign and our evaluation of the quality of it. So I hope you enjoyed this episode from Brands and Campaigns featuring Camden Bernatz's and Stuart Butler. Camden Bernatz: [00:02:38] Welcome to Brands and Campaigns, the stories and people behind clever marketing moves powered by EKR. I'm your host, Camden Bernatz, creative director and head of brand strategy at EKR. I'm excited about this unique type of campaign. It's the first one we've had on the show that really played into the or not it played into but utilized the artificial intelligence, the AI, that we've heard so much about. It is a campaign that was done through Myrtle Beach, Visit Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, a coastal community on the coast of South Carolina, a great destination for tourists and, and locals love it as well. And Myrtle Beach, if you haven't already followed them at all, they've done a great job of really kind of pioneering or leading the charge, so to speak when it comes to owned media as a destination and not just putting ads out for the sake of getting in front of people and asking them to come visit, but actually creating branded entertainment. And this isn't quite the same thing as branded entertainment, but it is another way that I think this destination has kind of been an early adopter, I guess so to speak of new opportunities, new technology, in this case, AI. The campaign, it's a little hard to explain. So I want to have our guest explain a little bit better than I will. But just to kind of set up what happened here is visit Myrtle Beach with their agency MMGY Global. Basically use artificial intelligence to come up with a rebrand for their destination. And when I say rebrand, it's kind of a in a humorous pretend way. They didn't actually fully rebrand their destination. But just to see if we gave, if we used artificial intelligence to say this is who we are and we want to be a new destination, we want to rebrand, what would you give us? And it spits out some results. And for those who have tested and poked around with artificial intelligence, it can do some amazing things. There are also some weaknesses. And so before I introduce our guest, I want to read this little summary that Adage wrote up about it. There's a little paragraph that I think captures it well. And they said this campaign, new generative AI to design a new logo, imagine a Times Square billboard that come up with action shots of families enjoying the beach. The logo, images and ad copy were exactly what one would expect from AI, that is to say uncanny and wacky. The name that the AI decided to rebrand Visit Myrtle Beach as was Mitarry Best. Maybe I'm saying that wrong. I don't know how AI intended the pronunciation to be. But instead of Myrtle Beach, it is now Mitarry Best. And to talk about the Mitarry Best campaign, we have Stuart Butler on with us today, the CMO of the Visit Myrtle Beach Chamber of Commerce. And so Stuart thanks for being on the show today. Stuart Butler: [00:05:33] Thank you for having me great setup. And just for the record, AI did not tell us how to pronounce it. We've all been pronouncing it, Mitarry Best. Camden Bernatz: [00:05:36] Oh Mitarry. Okay, thank you. Stuart Butler: [00:05:37] That's the official canon. It's Mitarry Best. Camden Bernatz: [00:05:39] Well, thank you. That's the first correction I needed. So, Mitarry Best. And so I guess the first question is, how did this idea start? Where did this idea come from to go to AI to see what they could do for your brand? Stuart Butler: [00:06:01] Well, it was a combination of a lot of factors. You know, I've been in the DMO world working with MMGY Global for a couple of years now, and I've been really pushing them and asking them to go above and beyond in terms of what subverting expectations. I'm a big fan of doing paid media that also gains earned media. And so we, we've been challenging them. They've been coming up some really creative and wacky ideas. This one in particular was a brainchild of their team and it really started with, hey we have a media buy with Reddit. We wanted to look at Reddit as a platform. Very few brands have done that successfully. We wanted to experiment. We knew what the audience was. You know, I'm a consumer of the platform. So I know how toxic that, that community can be. And now distrusting they are of advertisers. And we were also coming off the back of the controversy with Reddit, right, which was they were now going to start or they were charging for the API and it was knocking off a lot of platforms that were relying on Reddit. And so there was sort of a mutiny within the ranks of Reddit users where anyone that did anything remotely branded was just getting hounded, not safe for work content was getting put on. And so in reality, we had ended up waiting a little bit to launch this campaign because we were a little concerned about that. But the genesis was we wanted to do something, a mega thread on Reddit. We knew we couldn't make it advertising. We knew it had to be very on-brand for Reddit and on-brand for us. And Pizza Hut had done a campaign a little a few months ago where they were just very ironic with it. It was very tongue in cheek and it was, it was one of these like to do things how to make the perfect pizza. But they did it in a way that was very much, the payoff at the end was you just need to call Pizza Hut or order on the pizza app to get the perfect pizza. But they'd gone through, made people jump through the hoop. It was like a, you know, one of these sorts of sticks that you see a lot on social media, like, just a long drawn-out thing for little payoff. And they've done a pretty good job. So we wanted to sort of emulate that. And I'm not sure specifically who came up with the original idea, but I know a couple of folks, Brandon and Meredith in the creative team, within our creative team at MMGY, pitched us this idea of an AI-generated campaign. So they came up with this and the first thing they did was a logo. And I'm actually, here's the logo right here for those of you that are watching. Camden Bernatz: [00:08:49] Is that a sticker? Nice. Stuart Butler: [00:08:50] It's a sticker. So I'll get to the sticker and the merch in a little bit, but they came up with this logo and it's crazy. It's got like a weird alien creature thing. It's got a sky wheel which is very on-brand for Myrtle Beach. But then as we know, Generative AI right now and they were using Midjourney to do it, just AI doesn't do letters well yet. It's getting bit of a, it just changed the letters to say Mitarry Best instead of Myrtle Beach. And so that was one and then they done some other things. There was another image that was people eating seafood and they had this weird crustacean creature and then one of the people had a third hand coming out of their body. So would like that uncanny stuff that was happening. There was another one that was a sand castle that was full of people and legs and limbs coming out of it. It was very surreal. But then some of them were really cool and interesting, and you kind of want to be real. They we're really well known for our Carolina Country Music Festival, and they said, what would that look like on the water? And so they had this sort of stage floating on the ocean with a lot, a bunch of inflatables with the people laying in inflatables all around it. So there was some cool, interesting thing. But we wanted it to, to really convey the real message. We wanted it to say, okay if you go to Myrtle Beach, you can expect great dining experiences, great attractions, great golf, great, all these things that we're known for. So there was an element of truth in all of these sort of images. But then the real power came out when we started collaborating, my creative team internally with the MMGY creative team, sort of just polished it a little bit. So beyond just the initial Mitarry Best logo, we said, well let's Photoshop these a little bit and be consistent. So for example, if we wanted it to write a billboard, it wouldn't say Mitarry best. So we Photoshop it to say Mitarry Best instead of the gobbledygook that it came out. So then we went to GPT and started creating copy for it and we wanted it to come from a very robotic-sounding voice. So we prompted it to sound like people's fears are with AI. It started talking about the AI overlords. And really exaggerating the campaign to the point where it was obvious that it was this parody, obvious, it was ridiculous. But we just kept leaning in and then we said, well instead of just having a mega thread, let's build a landing page. So the calls to action from the mega thread led to a page within our website where we actually switched out the logo from Visit Myrtle Beach to Mitarry Best. We put a bunch of more information about the destination, including how to get a visitor guide. But obviously, we didn't call it a visitor guide. We call it something very computery. And then once we rolled it out, we just sort of held our breath and initially everyone was saying, let's roll it out without comments turned on and I'm a little bit of a gambler, and so I'm like, you know what, we can always turn it back off, but let's just see how people react, and I don't know of any other brand that's left comments on a Reddit mega thread. But we took the risk and boy did it pay off. People really, really loved it. And we had, I think we're nearing 40 million impressions. We've got a couple of 1000 comments at this point. Most of them are very much golf claps or people saying this is the best advertising I've ever seen. You have a lot of real enthusiasm from the community. And what we saw was when people started to criticize it as being advertising on Reddit, the community came to our defense and said no, this is actually entertaining. I want this kind of content. This made me laugh. And then there was a few people that just didn't get the joke and were like, what, why is Myrtle Beach rebranding? So it was very entertaining. And we, we, we continued the joke with our responses. Again, the team from MMGY did a phenomenal job responding to every comment and being very tongue-in-cheek. And we had to use GPT again to create some of those responses as if we were the AI. So it was really just a combination of this fear that's in the zeitgeist about AI which is totally unfounded, and the fact that everyone's talking about it and we wanted to have a little bit of fun. And one of the things that came out of it is we started seeing people asking for merch, they really loved it. And, so we had our team internally spin up a quick online store and started selling merch, and we sold several products including this really garbage hat, where the logo just looks terrible. But we put ridiculous products on there that we said what would be the least likely that people would buy? We had a wraparound skater skirt with the logo on it. We had a baby onesie, we had some an apron, a Christmas ornament and people were buying this merch. It was, it was bizarre. So if you see someone walking around with a Mitarry Best Merch on, you know where they got it from. Although we had some bootleggers. We had a couple of there was a store on Etsy that started selling Mitarry. They grabbed our logo that we created and they started selling Merch on Etsy. So I guess mimicry is the best form of flattery, but we certainly punched a hole in the zeitgeist. And then as you mentioned, we got written up in Ad Age and a bunch of other magazines. And so, yeah, it was a really fun one and we didn't quite know what to expect, but it certainly surpassed those expectations. Camden Bernatz: [00:14:18] Well, that uniqueness is definitely why I wanted to have that episode about this. Because you, I think you, you highlighted the brilliance of this campaign. I think you highlighted when you said how people on Reddit came to the defense of it. Say no, this is actually what I want to see. That is what you as a destination I think are doing really well in this campaign, is just one execution of that, in which it's branded entertainment. Like yes, in some form, it is an advertisement because it does put your name in front of people. And obviously, you want to be have your brand perceived in the way that people want to come visit Myrtle Beach, of course. But people don't, aren't opposed to getting good things given to them. They just don't want it when it's shamelessly like demanding their attention, or it's not providing value, it's just trying to take value. And this hits a bunch of different areas. I guess I've read it where it's got the humor aspect, kind of funny. Those who are about travel and destinations, it's in that space. And then the tech and AI, whether you're for or afraid of it, whatever that might be the different debates online. There's different groups that you've all you attached this or you reach with this campaign in such a way that, yeah, it's like it's not seen as advertising, even though it kind of serves that purpose. And again, for everyone who's listening, we always recommend you to go check this out because this is a podcast. Unless you're seeing some of these video clips later, most of you are not seeing this right now what we're talking about. And so go check out the visuals because like Stuart said that the logo is, I mean, it's got lots of colors and stuff. I'm not quite sure what most of it means. It's just kind of a lot of like you said, some interesting shapes and imagery. And there's that sandcastle, there’s probably 40 people inside this sandcastle. It's like a, it looks like people could live in there. And they're just, yeah, some of them have, are extra limbs, missing limbs. There's that one that they're eating seafood. And I think AI based it off of a crab because it looks crablike, but it’s like. Stuart Butler: [00:16:16] Yeah, it looks sort of like a crab, lobster fusion going on. Camden Bernatz: [00:16:18] Yeah. It looks alien. Stuart Butler: [00:16:19] It looks – certainly an additional hand. There's two people and five hands eating it. Camden Bernatz: [00:16:22] Yes. Stuart Butler: [00:16:23] So it's like Thing from the Adams family jumped out into it. Camden Bernatz: [00:16:25] It’s just looks nice enough. Oh, it's a nice picture. And then you look a little longer and the longer you look, it gets weirder and yeah, that’s what you get. Stuart Butler: [00:16:31] Yeah, all of them are like that, right? There's something like there's the one in Times Square where you look and there's a lady that's actually got no top on and on the back of her, it is completely bare and you're like, oh, that's not really on brand, but we didn't even notice it. It was the consumer that started pointing it out. But going back to your point, I think what we're trying to do to disrupt is we understand that consumers are rejecting advertising. Just look at the adoption of pop-up blockers, and the battle that's going on now with YouTube trying to prevent people from using pop-up blockers. It's not going to end well for YouTube. They're going to end up standing in front of Congress here pretty soon with people saying, why are you preventing people's individual choice? But I think what we're going to see, is an increase in people not wanting to receive ads. And the ads, they do, they're going to have to do better than just say, buy my product, right? Because people are tuning them out. So what we're trying to do is create advertising, that's also entertainment. We're trying to drive awareness. We know that psychology tells us that if you tell someone to do something, they're less likely to do it than if they decide they're going to do it themselves. So by us doing a campaign like this where we're obsessed with the customer, whoever that is, whatever platform, we really try to understand who that is and what they want. And then we craft something and deliver it to them that they're going to perceive as valuable. Then we're building a relationship with them, and that's what we're trying to do. We're not in the transaction game. We're in a relationship-building game. And so we know, you know Adam's book, Touch Points, right? Which talks about this every touch point, you have any, every interaction you have with the consumer is either going to increase your likelihood of doing business with them or decrease it at some point. And so, which direction is this ad going? I can promise you if you just say I buy my wares, you're eroding that relationship. But if you're providing value, which we did through entertainment in this case, then people are a lot more likely to want to buy your products or come visit your destination. Camden Bernatz: [00:18:32] Yeah, exactly. And talking about a touch point, this campaign as a touch point of the destination, the brand, while it's not necessarily the attractions or things to do in Myrtle Beach, they're kind of baked in, but they're not necessarily on the forefront or the main thing on display. The fact that you did this creative tech-forward type of thing with a little bit of humor makes your destination seem for lack of a better word, cool. That cool was overused and doesn't do anything. But you're now a cooler destination and people that don't do this. And so it's, even though it has nothing to do with like the exact restaurant or hotel or the beach, whatever it's like, oh, yeah, that place did this thing. I'm kind of more intrigued by them now than I was. Stuart Butler: [00:19:14] Yeah. And we were very much, you know, looking at the Trojan Horse strategy. You know, we wanted to get as much real information to the consumer as possible while they were reading through this post and then the subsequent landing page because, you know, a lot of people that we were meeting there on Reddit were not familiar with the brand at all. This was, this was a sort of what I would consider, you know, low sort of quality consumer compared to what we're doing on say Google or Facebook. I don't mean low qualities that they wouldn't go on to book. I mean, as we don't know a lot about them and they probably don't line up perfectly with our traditional demographics, but we're always looking to get incremental, new business, always looking for new honeypots of consumers, right? So this wasn't a particularly expensive campaign, it was more of an experiment. And we wanted to see, we know sort of age and demographics of the Reddit consumer. We don't know a lot more about their behavior. And so we wanted to see what we could do. And so knowing they weren't, haven't really necessarily been introduced to our brand before. This was maybe a first conversation we've had with them. We wanted to make sure we're getting a lot of that top-level information across to them in a unique way. And so anyone that reads through it is going to learn. Okay, Myrtle Beach has 2000 restaurants. It has 60 miles of open beaches. It has dozens, if not hundreds of attractions. It's got great live music. Oh, by the way, it's also sensory-friendly. People with autism love coming to Myrtle Beach. It's certified sensory-friendly. So we, we're putting all these sort of talking points within the content that now people know about Myrtle Beach that they perhaps didn't and they just, they're consuming it almost through osmosis as they're reading this entertaining content. So it was really successful. And we did get some critics, you know, people saying, well, how are you going to measure success and things like that? And I think those are valid questions. Some of them were a little too snarky the way they asked the question. But it's a fair question. And so, you know, we don't know yet, you know. This was a recent campaign. We don't know how many people are going to actually show up in market, we're going to be able to measure that. But we did do know we captured a lot of data, we captured a lot of email addresses and we're going to be able to follow those people throughout and see if they end up coming in into in the market. So again, we didn't spend a ton of money, but this was an experiment and I think it was a success from an awareness perspective. And whenever you get written up in Ad Age twice in the same week for a campaign, I feel like you're onto something pretty solid. Camden Bernatz: [00:21:43] Definitely, definitely. Do you happen to know any of the details of what the, the prompts that were put in? Like, I don't think it was used specifically writing those, right? But do you know what was put into this Midjourney Chat GPT? How did that, what was fed to it in order to get these kinds of results? Stuart Butler: [00:22:01] Yeah. Well, I think with any prompt, you want to be as explicit as possible, you know. I think the one of the criticisms of AI is, you know, it's not consistent. And I don't know that that's true because I think it's consistent based on the quality of the prompt, you know. To me you want to put in a few different things. You want to talk about what subject matter it's an expert on. So what's it basing its response on. You want to put in, who the audience is? Like, who are you aiming this response at? You want to put in the voice that it's coming out at? So who are you speaking as in this case, we would say, you know, but certainly for the GPT stuff where it was the text, we wanted it to be an AI talking. We didn't want it to sound too human. So we're asking it to do that and obviously, there's back and forth refinements to everything you do. I'll be honest, the Midjourney stuff was pretty much, pretty much nailed it first time. I mean, we, I have seen the prompts and they were pretty elaborate, but nothing too crazy. And Midjourney did a really good job of, you know, making them a little weird in a way that we just, you couldn't, a human wouldn't be able to do. So, yeah, I think with anything, any new technology, the more you play with it, the better, more comfortable you're going to get with it. And I think for those of you that have dabbled in AI, and it's not for you yet, I would encourage you to keep using it. I personally have found it makes me 10-20% more efficient in my day-to-day. It's the second tab, I have open after my email. And I use both GPTs. I use BOD from Google. I use Midjourney. I use Dollie. I use multiple tools depending on the situation. But I find that I'm getting better at using the tool, the more I use it. And I'm instead of saying, I started out sort of thinking of it as an afterthought like I had a task to perform. Okay, can AI help me with this? Now, I'm like, I just assume AI can help me with everything. And the question is more, how can AI help me with this versus can it help me with this? Camden Bernatz: [00:24:06] Yeah, how can use it. Stuart Butler: [00:24:07] Unless you know, if I'm just responding quickly to an email, I don't use it. But if I'm writing something that needs to be persuasive, if I'm analyzing data, if I'm trying to be creative, any of that stuff, AI is making me a smarter more effective CMO. Camden Bernatz: [00:24:24] Awesome. So looking beyond you as the individual to the organization as a whole, even considering its obvious imperfections that we can see in this Mitarry Best campaign, as the destination that have clear plans to keep using AI, not just in like these kinds of humorous ways, but is AI have a consistent role in your marketing plans going forward? Stuart Butler: [00:24:43] 100%. Yeah. Every one of my team members, I encouraged to use it regularly. I've had a few companies and agencies and other folks that are putting aside time to discuss what they're doing. And we haven't implemented that, but I'm really thinking about doing that with that. We have a weekly team meeting and thinking about having a sort of show and tell. What did you use AI for this week? And because I think we're all going to learn. I think it's important to get everyone involved, but to think through the implications and ramifications, right? There are some potholes there, there are some risks involved. I think things like intellectual property. We've seen people get caught out with the hallucinations that certainly happen when you're trying to create facts from AI. Everyone's heard the story about the attorney that got disbarred. I don't even know if it's true at this point, but everyone sort of tells it as a cautionary tale because it fabricated some cases that weren't real. So I think you've got to know its limitations. But just like any technology, it's going to get better. This is the worst AI is ever going to be for us, right? And so it's going to get better iteratively and maybe exponentially every day that we use it. And so, I think a good friend of mine, Tim Peter with Tim Peter and Associates always says AI is not going to steal your job, but smart people who use AI will steal your job. And so we, we've got to use this technology because if we're not, our competition is and they're just going to have a massive advantage over us. I mean, it makes you smarter, faster, more creative. It’s just an accelerator across the board at everything you do. And so you have to encourage your entire staff to use it. There's not a position in your organization. If you're working on computers where AI cannot improve what you're doing. There's not, from contract writing to proposal writing, to ideation, you know, everything in between it's just going to make you just a little bit better. And it's worth the time to invest now to learn that because it's just going to improve day in day out. But I do say again, go cautiously, especially if you're creating a product for someone else. Like if you're an agency, creating a product for a client, I think disclosing how you're using AI is really important. Like as a customer of agencies, I want to know if AI is being used and how it's being used. I want to make sure I'm protected from an IP perspective, things like that. But you're crazy if you're not embracing it at this point, absolutely crazy. Camden Bernatz: [00:27:18] Yeah. And even if you have hesitancies, I feel like the best way to basically, you can know what it is. And so, like by experimenting, getting in there either you’re going to love it and will use it all the time, even if, although I agree with you that people shouldn't be averse to using it. But even if you're like, oh, I still don't want to use it that much, at least know what it is and what it's a not. So you're not misrepresenting it or you're not missing out on aspects that you may want to use it for and things like that. Stuart Butler: [00:27:46] Yeah, I mean, to me, it's akin to someone saying they don't want to use AI if they're in a digital world, or if they're working digitally for them to say, they don't want to use AI today is like the people back in the day that said they didn't want to use a computer. Camden Bernatz: [00:28:03] Yep. Stuart Butler: [00:28:03] It's as revolutionary, it's as efficiency building, it's as game-changing as that was, and there were holdouts. But what happened to those holdouts? Either they converted, or they were obsolete and they were out of a job. So AI is that transformative. It’s getting baked into everything we do, whether we like it or not, no matter how hard the Biden administration tries to curtail that the recent legislation that or executive order that came out is just asinine, and that regardless of your political affiliation. I think most people agree that this country America was built on innovation, and what the government is trying to do, whether you're left or right or somewhere in between is such an overstretch that is going to penalize America, and it's going to allow a lot of other countries to catch up with the innovation that's happened in the US. So I think become knowledgeable, become vocal about the importance of it, become a user of it. But if you're not, you're going to be those guys that didn't learn to use a computer or a smartphone. It's that simple. Camden Bernatz: [00:29:10] Those are good examples. Bring politics into it. We need some engagement, some hot takes on this podcast to get together. Stuart Butler: [00:29:16] We talk about religion next. Camden Bernatz: [00:29:16] Yeah. So we mentioned the landing page. I don't think we actually mentioned the URL for those who want to check that out, Mitarrybest.com. And that is like you said, it lays out, it's like a travel guide. It's like a website that's introducing the website, but clearly written by AI and owning that. Kind of, it's a little bit, yeah, I guess you just got to check it out to see what it's like. You’ll see what I’m talking about. Stuart Butler: [00:29:42] Yeah, it's hard to describe, right? But I would encourage people to go to Reddit too. If you just top search for Mitarry Best in Reddit. That's where the mega thread lives. So that's sort of the gateway into it. The website does live on its own, and it is great to enjoy. But I think that it's best enjoyed as a couple, right, where you see the mega thread and then the landing page, and then go check out the store and if you want to buy some merch. Camden Bernatz: [00:30:05] Yeah go get it. Stuart Butler: [00:30:06] Please do. It's still up for a little while longer. We're going to take it down eventually. Camden Bernatz: [00:30:11] But my question is, how long are you going to keep the landing page Mitarrybest.com? Do you have a run time for that, or is it just kind of play it by ear? Stuart Butler: [00:30:18] Well, the campaign just ended last month. So you know, we'll monitor it and see if the traffic maintains, you know. You started seeing Mitarry Best show up in Google Suggest on search. So, it's like it certainly was getting some traction there. If it's getting traffic, we'll probably keep it up for a while, you know. We'll probably take down the online store between before too long. The sales have slowed down certainly there. But yeah, it's fun. We learned a lot. And it's just the first of many crazy things we're going to be doing. Camden Bernatz: [00:30:51] Awesome. Well, on that note, as far as things you're going to be doing, is there anything we should be looking out for anything you like to promote or what's next for Myrtle Beach that we should be looking for? Stuart Butler: [00:31:00] Well for the destination itself, we've got our first-ever, PGA tour event coming next year. Camden Bernatz: [00:31:05] Awesome. Stuart Butler: [00:31:05] Which we're super excited about. We’re the golf capital of the world. We have 90-plus golf courses. We've got 50 plus mini golf courses. The top golf and soon there'll be a Top Stroke. So if you're into any form of golf and all of its flavors were the place to come. So we've got that event in May of next year. And it's unbelievable, we've never, as the golf capital of the world. We've never had a PGA tour event, main event before. We've only had, I think we've had the senior tour in the past. So we're excited about that. All hands on deck gearing up for that. But from an advertising promotion, marketing perspective, we're continuing to push the envelope which we continue to explore projects. We've got a couple of TV projects. We already launched one last year called Chef Swap at the Beach, which was on the cooking channel. Season two is coming to the Cooking Channel in the spring. And then, we've got a new project that is in post-production right now called Travelling The Spectrum, which is a project that I'm really passionate about. We're trying to tackle a systemic problem, which is 87% of families who have kids on the autism spectrum don't travel, you know, for a variety of reasons, there's stigma, there's friction stress, just they don't know if their child can handle the stimulation. And so we've done a lot of work over the last decade with the help of folks like Champion Autism Network to understand the challenges and create solutions for that the neurodiverse communities. And we want to do more than just do it for ourselves. We want to actually impact the world and we talk a lot about making a little dent in the universe to steal a quote from Steve Jobs. And so we're creating this TV show. We've already shot it. We brought three families to the Myrtle Beach area, all of which have a different situation within the family. All of which have a neurodiverse person, someone on the autism spectrum, and we just documented their experience. And we're showing people that you can travel if you have autism or a family member with autism. It's not easy, but travel never is easy for anyone. And so we're just trying to make it a little bit easier for this community. And we're, we're talking to some big streaming publishers right now about where it's going to live. Camden Bernatz: [00:33:20] Awesome. Stuart Butler: [00:33:20] But I'm super excited. That's one of my favorite projects I've ever worked on in my 20-plus-year career. And then we're doing just a lot of our own content. We've worked with the Relic agency on a few podcasts. We have just rebranded, I Speak Mama, it's a mom podcast. And then we have another one if you're really into sort of deep conversations about life and introspection., it’s a show called Life's a Beach and Then You Die, which is exactly what it sounds like. It talks about people's trials, tribulations, triumphs. And so those are both available wherever you listen to podcasts. But we're trying to create content that earns an audience instead of just trying to sell products to people through advertising. We're trying to create audience, and from audience we can create a community, and from community, we can shape behavior. And so we're, we're playing the long game. Camden Bernatz: [00:34:14] There’s a lot going on. Stuart Butler: [00:34:14] We're not taking shortcuts. But yeah, we have a lot going on as, as always, but it's a lot of fun. We enjoy what we do. Camden Bernatz: [00:34:21] Definitely. Well I'm, good luck with all that stuff and I'm very impressed with you and your team in Destinations. Like I said at the beginning, like really leading out on a lot of those things where a lot of destinations are. I think you can kind of be an example to them. And there's kind of an old way of doing things and there's still some pieces of that that should be kept around, but there's a lot of new stuff and new ways of approaching not just destination marketing but marketing in general that I think you guys are leading out on showing a good example. And I appreciate your time and talk about this campaign and I'm sure there'll be lots of other stuff down the road that we may want to have you back on and talk about other cool brand and, or campaigns that are, that are coming out. What's the best way for people to follow you or your Destination if they want to get in touch or anything like that? Stuart Butler: [00:35:07] Yeah, I mean, our website is visit Myrtlebeach.com and you can find us on all the social media. We’re having a lot of fun on TikTok right now. So definitely go check that out. And then you can find me on LinkedIn. It's just Stuart Butler on, on LinkedIn. And yeah, I look forward to hearing any questions that the crop up would be happy to come back at a later date. We have more fun things to talk about. Camden Bernatz: [00:35:31] Great, great, looking forward to it. So that's been our episode about Mitarry Best. I really, again, I said this before but you got to go check it out because it, describing it with just the audio doesn't do it justice. You've got to see the language that the AI spit out and the images that go with it. This has been a good conversation and I appreciate your time Stuart. As always, we ask you to subscribe to the podcast if you're enjoying it, maybe share it with someone, you know. And of course, we appreciate reviews as well. We're still fairly new. So it helps us get the word out there and get some exposure. These have been Brands and Campaigns and we'll see you next time. Adam Stoker: [00:36:14] I hope you all enjoyed this discussion about the amazing Mitarry Best campaign from Visit Myrtle Beach, where Stuart and Camden talked about the strategy behind that campaign and some of the impact that was had. I hope now you enjoyed the conversation between Camden and I where we kind of dissect this campaign and talk a little bit about our evaluation and what was accomplished with the campaign. So now the next several minutes of the show are going to be Camden and I discussing what you just heard. Camden Bernatz: [00:36:44] So today, we've got back with us again, Adam Stoker. If you listen to the first episode of this show, you'll remember him or if you tune into his podcast, the Destination Marketing Podcast. He is the CEO and owner of EKR, and he's here today to talk to us about the Mitarry Best AI-powered campaign that we talked about with Stuart Butler in Visit Myrtle Beach. So Adam, welcome back to the show. Adam Stoker: [00:37:07] Thanks for having me, Camden. I'm glad to be back. Camden Bernatz: [00:37:09] Glad to have you. So this or this campaign, I guess if you want to call it this initiative, this AI-powered campaign that Myrtle Beach did. It was obviously very relevant the current zeitgeist of all things AI, right? And we, I know internally that our agency, we have talked a lot about the potential usages at AI from an agency or marketing perspective, potential downsides and things like that. And before I get to any super specific questions, just as you listen to this conversation, we had any initial takeaways or insights or anything that stood out to you? Adam Stoker: [00:37:41] Yeah, I, I had a few takeaways, Camden, a couple that I'll probably start with one we were talking about before we jumped on and started recording, and that's the fact that when you nail the dynamic between an agency and a client. And the agency knows they have permission to experiment and the client is willing to do something that they haven't done before. And the way the relationship is structured actually facilitates that, that's when greatness happens. And I think this was a great example of an agency that knew they had a little bit of freedom, a little bit of leeway to take some of the time that, that they're paid for, in the relationship and do something really unique and really cool. And I think without the correct agency-client dynamic, it's going to be really difficult to come up with stuff that, that's that innovative and unique. And then the second thing that I found really interesting in this conversation is that when AI really kind of came out last year and, and of course, we've had versions of AI that have been out before, but Chat GPT really kind of changed the entire brand of AI in the world. And, you know, when that came out, the last organization that I expected to get, the type of press, that this Mitarry Best campaign got, is a quasi-government organization funded by tax dollars, because the reality is even now as we watch the government attempt to figure out a way to regulate AI and how to try to put fail safes in place. You'll listen to some of these politicians try to talk about AI and it's just so clear that they have no clue, right? And, and so to have, visit Myrtle Beach, who is a, they're not a government organization, but I would say they're ancillary to a government organization. And they are so innovative, and on the front end of this, that they were one of the first to release a really unique and interesting AI campaign. And I think that speaks to the willingness and in full disclosure, Stuart and I are really good, really close friends, and so, you know, I'm sure that my bias is showing in some way here but it doesn't change the fact that one of the best uses of AI that I've seen so far came out of Stuart and his organization, and of course, from the agency that they were working with. We have a relationship with Myrtle Beach professionally. We do work with them professionally. But I want to be very clear that, that this campaign came from another agency called MMGY, that did such a brilliant job of testing a new technology and showing how to use that and bring it forth early enough to where it was newsworthy, when in fact, I think now a lot of the interesting AI use cases that are coming out are not newsworthy because they've been done because they've been tried. Camden Bernatz: [00:40:43] Exactly. That's something I wanted to comment on, like, I totally agree with you as far as the dynamic of the agency and client relationship was crucial here, but also just being willing to take a risk to do something kind of quirky, kind of weird that not everyone maybe even understood when it first happened, because AI was still new enough. That, yeah, it was unproven ground, so to speak because what people find this interesting where they even understand kind of the joke or the humor and what we're doing. But to take that risk, it was still calculated. It wasn't like a total just swing in the dark, but to do that early, like you said, makes the big difference. And, yeah, yeah, now, if someone were to do the exact same thing, it's not interesting anymore. Not near as interesting as it would have been when it first happened. And so that's something I, that stood out to me is just being willing to try new things and it’s okay to be the first even imperfectly. Maybe you would do something different if you go back and do it again. But you made your mark and it went viral. Adam Stoker: [00:41:33] Yeah, I want to, I want to comment one more thing on that and that's the fact that you have to be open-minded to try something new because I can see a lot of people when they put the prompt into AI and said okay, you know, or into Chat GPT, they say we want to rebrand Myrtle Beach, what would your suggestion be? And it spits out Mitarry Best. And I could see somebody who's not open-minded saying this is stupid. AI is way off. It's not even there yet. You know what I mean? And instead what you got was holy cow, this is interesting. How could we use this? And I think in any situation from a marketing perspective, instead of saying that didn't work. And instead asking the question, how we can use this, could probably help us not stifle what can be innovation or greatness by working within the confines of what we've done before. Camden Bernatz: [00:42:28] Yeah, that's insightful. And I like that the fact that it was even though it was still kind of quirky and obviously that the wording of this and again, for referencing back to the conversation with Stuart, part of this campaign is they built a landing page. So a part of the visit where Myrtle Beach website has this welcome mat of visit, welcome to Mitarry Best. And it's as if you were able to visit this place, which Myrtle Beach you can, Mitarry best you can. But what I was going to say is it was still useful in the sense that it's still showcasing things to do in Myrtle Beach within the quirky AI stuff, like I won't read the whole web page, but we didn't get too much into the content last time. Like the opening says, greetings human travelers and some of the things that features is like engage in systematic beach exploration, execute a program to visit to Broadway at the beach, engage in algorithmically optimized golfing simulation. So silly stuff like that, but it's like we have beaches we have shows we have you know, outdoor recreation, and all this stuff. You can, you kind of get an interesting insight like, hey, obviously this is kind of a silly AI thing, but Myrtle Beach actually seems interesting. I should keep clicking around and figure out what there is to do. Adam Stoker: [00:43:34] Yeah. This is the benefit Camden of being an early adopter. I think being an early adopter is very high risk and very high reward, right? Like one of the things that can happen is you can put a lot of time and resources into something and have it failed miserably. And of course, you've got egg on your face and everything from being the person to spearhead that. But the other side of this is, this Mitarry Best concept that came from AI it was newsworthy because nobody else had done anything like this. And you know, Stuart mentioned that there was two write-ups in Ad Age within a week about this campaign. It was so new that it generated a lot of earned impact. And so for a lot of us, as we think about trying new things, I think there's a lot of fear. What if you know in a destination, you have to worry a lot about your stakeholders, right? What are the people that fund our organization going to think? And you know, in a business organization, it's, well, what's my director going to think, what's the CMO going to think? And you know, how will this affect my job? But even though that's a high risk that you could fail the other side of it is the reward. If you take a big swing like that and try something that nobody else has tried before, you can actually break down barriers that may have taken you years to break down in another scenario. So I just, I'm a big believer in the fact that we need to be trying new things. Even if there's a potential risk or a perceived risk being out on the front end, like I said before, made this newsworthy. Whereas today, I don't know that it would be. Camden Bernatz: [00:45:09] Yeah, I agree. So I'm going to ask you to just imagine for a minute that you said it was MMGY that did this, it wasn't our agency. So we were in a fly on the wall in the conference room, so to speak when this came to be. But let's say you had the idea, hey, what if we used AI to see with it how it would do a rebrand, and you typed in whatever they typed in, got Mitarry Best. Like you initially started to see some of the output from AI. Jumping ahead to where it's at now. They had this landing page. They have like the Reddit thread they started. They have a merch, temporary merch store. You can buy Mitarry Best stuff. It expanded to multiple channels. How do you think, I know this is not necessarily an easy answer but from being the agency that has the computer in your office that had the idea of typing something into AI and seeing what happens, to then pitching a client and scoping out a plan for how you're going to multichannel, run this out. What's the best way to like? How do you, how do you pitch that to the client? How do you go ahead? Did this weird thing on my computer? And now you should invest money into this. How do you do that? Adam Stoker: [00:46:07] Well, and first of all, the thing that I think is really funny here to think about is not just how do you pitch this to the client, but within an organization like MMGY that has multiple layers, this is one of their very biggest clients. And so you had to have somebody and I believe he mentioned the name in the previous episode of who the person was. I can't remember. I thought his name might have been Ben, but I might be remembering incorrectly. But imagine the conversation between the person that first broached this and their boss because that's a thing that I think happens in a bureaucracy a lot of times, and by the way, not insinuating in any way that MMGY is a bureaucracy or they're unable to move quickly or anything, they obviously demonstrated that they can. But when you have layers of management, there's always a measure of fear there or uncertainty of whether or not this is going to be good for your personal brand as you pitch these new ideas, right? So the person actually had to say, okay, here's the prompt that I put into Chat GPT here's what it spit out. And I think we ought to put Mitarry Best in front of visit Myrtle Beach. And it's like, are you crazy? There's no way we're putting that in front of our biggest client or one of our biggest clients. And I think that speaks to the importance of in that conversation thinking to yourself first, okay, how can we use this and then what's the potential benefit here? And I think, you know, as I imagine how those conversations went internally, it's like, hey, if this works, we're going to get a lot of earned media out of this. And so by the time they got to the client, they said, here's what we think we should do and here's how it can benefit you OPS, here's the risks, right? And it was very obviously, easy for Stuart and his team to make an informed decision about what the correct approach would be. And again, they knew there was a risk, but they chose innovation and I think it really paid off. Camden Bernatz: [00:48:12] Yeah, going back to what you were saying about the benefit of the relationship and to sing the praises a little bit of visit Myrtle Beach and Stuart's team having worked with them ourselves in some capacities. We know that they are very much looking for strategy recommendations. There are some clients out there, whether destinations or otherwise that are like, hey, we know that we want some Instagram ads and maybe a YouTube ad and a couple of billboards or whatever newsletter. And they will look for someone to go fill on what they know they want. And that's not bad. That's not to diss on having your own marketing plan. That's fine. But when they're also open to say and whatever ideas you can give us, we're also hiring you for your strategy, your creativity and your insight, pitch us with anything you have that not every idea is a winner obviously. But being open to that captures things like this. No one can pre-emptively plan something like this. It had to be a, I wonder what AI would say and just, you know, playing around with it and figuring out what you could get and then put it into Midjourney and stuff. It was very experimental. So them as a client, as a brand being open to that allowed them to be that kind of first to market and be exciting and novel. It's because it wasn't just a good campaign that they put up a good line on a video or billboard or something. It was using a technology and way people hadn't really used it. And it was, I mean, yeah, we're hitting, beating a dead horse here about how new and experimental it was, I guess. But I just wanted to point out the value of being a client that's open to getting ideas of things you didn't ask for. Adam Stoker: [00:49:40] Well, so, and again, being a client that will be understanding when somebody comes and says, we spent x number of hours exploring this concept that on its face doesn't make any sense at all, right? So, hey, you pay us a monthly retainer. We used a portion of those funds to explore AI's reaction to this. And of course, obviously, that was a great thing. But I think there's a lot of agency, client relationships where the client says, you know, here's what we want to do. Here's the type of campaign we want to run and we're looking for a fulfilment partner. But when all you're looking for is a fulfillment partner, what you lose is innovation and ideation. And then at some point, you're asking the question, well, why don't we just do this in-house? And so if you set up that dynamic of the relationship correctly between the agency and the client where the agency has permission to innovate and the client understands that a portion of what they're paying is going to go towards strategy and innovation. I think that's the real sweet spot and I've actually heard Stuart say several times that every organization should reserve a portion of their budget for testing, and that's testing aim, at the beginning of the year, you might not even know what that testing budget is going to go towards. But at least you know that you're going to be testing new ideas, new products, new technologies and you might end up hitting a home run like they did. Camden Bernatz: [00:51:07] Yeah. Yeah, that's even just even in the mindset to think that this isn't wasting a throwaway money. It's been properly budgeted for testing and it may end up not going anywhere, but it helps you feel better spending it. Yeah, I'm impressed having worked within our own agency and all those different processes and teams that have to collaborate and then with an agency or with clients and their brands. Just the fact that this came together the way it did, it just impressive of people being on the ball and collaborating and timing and things like that. Jumping again to it, so we talked a lot about the process of what went into this, thinking about the result which in tourism, you know, this especially being very involved in the tourism marketing space. That attribution is always a challenge when it comes to tourism. People don't often just see an ad in that moment click and like book a hotel, right? It's something that has multiple levels to the funnel, a longer time to plan and whatnot. So if you're a person, just a regular consumer who saw this found it humorous. How do you think this type of campaign frames Myrtle Beach in your mind? Like what do you get from this? Does it make you want to visit them? Does it make you interested in finding out more? I don’t know that's not something you can point to data and exactly say this is what happened. But what do you think the effect of this is? Adam Stoker: [00:52:22] Well, so this is where you got to go back to the marketing funnel and under understand what their goals and objectives were with the campaign. And so when we look at the marketing funnel, we have awareness consideration and purchase. And I can tell you right now that the Mitarry Best campaign was not a campaign for the purchase stage of the marketing funnel. This was definitely intended to generate awareness for the destination. And one of the things that Stuart mentioned in your conversation that I thought was really, really smart is he looks for opportunities when he runs a paid campaign opportunities to have an idea that's going to also generate some earned media opportunity as well. And so he knew that by running this campaign, you're also going to get a lot of news coverage of it. And again, it goes back to awareness. If the goal was to get more people to be aware of Myrtle Beach, I would argue that the level of press coverage that they got unquestionably generated the attention that they were looking to capture. And the thing that I really like that Myrtle Beach does is once they get your attention, their strategy is to engage you in a variety of ways instead of just asking you to visit. So when you, let's say you saw the Mitarry Best campaign and yeah, you saw the campaign, you went to the website and checked it out. You're not saying bye bye bye bye bye. You're seeing, here's a couple of podcasts that we have. Here's a couple of you know, streaming shows that we have all designed to help you get to know Myrtle Beach, and maybe move your way from awareness to consideration to purchase. And I think they do a great job of that. So would I as a consumer if I watched the, you know, looked at this campaign and saw the write-up and Ad Age about Mitarry Best? Would I book a trip? I would say no, not necessarily, but I would also say that's probably not the intention or the objective of the campaign at that point in time. It's just to get more people aware of the destination. I’m sorry. Camden Bernatz: [00:54:28] Go ahead. Adam Stoker: [00:54:30] Let me just add one thing here. I think this is what most organizations get wrong when they're talking about attribution is we're going to try to run something that's designed to get more eyeballs. And then we're going to say, did we sell more product? The question is, what did you build to build the bridge between an awareness tactic like this campaign and an actual purchase? What type of assets did you build for that bridge that's actually going to help them move through the funnel? And if you didn't, you can't say that the Mitarry Best campaign didn't work. You can say that you didn't necessarily build the assets you needed to help progress them all the way through to a purchase. Camden Bernatz: [00:55:08] Exactly the dream situation is that you don't have to force your way in front of an audience, but they are inviting you to be in front of them. So this maybe you, maybe that start with and paid media like we like Stuart talked about you, you still use that. But then if you have, you entertain them in some way, you provide value through some owned media, a podcast, a show, whatever humorous content like this, whatever it is. Then people who want to, they'll sign up for a newsletter or a text list or they'll subscribe to your social media accounts or whatever it might be. If you continuously provide value and give more than you're just asking. Like, please buy, please sign up, please like and share whatever, then, by the way, like and share the podcast. But yeah, that then it's like, yeah, it doesn't mean there's not a place for paid media or paid advertising. But man, that to flip that scale to where more and more people are basically signing up to get you in front of them. That's so much more sustainable and cost-effective. Adam Stoker: [00:56:07] Yeah, I mean the other component of this is again, attribution is something that a lot of people look at as direct response. So they say okay, they clicked on the ad, they should buy the product, right? But looking at the auto industry, 2% of the market is in the market for a vehicle at any given time. So that means 98% of people when they see your message, they're not ready to buy. And so I would also argue that trying to provide attribution for a campaign like this and judge at the end of the calendar year, whether or not that generated bookings when some of the people that book one trip a year haven't even entered the buying cycle yet, I think that's another major issue. So it's awareness first just to make sure that you're there when they are booking their trip. And this goes for any other product, right? Like this goes for a variety of different types of organizations. But if somebody's not in the market, and like SAS is another great example, if I'm tied up in a contract for the rest of this year, and I've got a SAS salesman just beating down my door trying to get me to switch from one technology to another. It's like, dude, I'm in a contract and I'm not going to double up on my expenses just so you can make a sale by the end of the month, right? Camden Bernatz: [00:57:25] I am certain to vote for me, I don't like you anymore. Adam Stoker: [00:57:27] Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So it's like what you need to do is build a relationship with them so that when they are in the market, you are part of the consideration process and that's what a campaign like this is designed to do. Camden Bernatz: [00:57:41] Just thinking about that. That's good. We’ve hit on a lot of different insights and you've shared a lot of good things that I'm going to keep thinking about after this. But continuing the idea about like application for or lessons or takeaways for other brands, maybe particularly in the destination marketing space in this case, is anything else send out to you is like, because you can't just duplicate this, right? You shouldn't see something, oh that works. We're going to do the same thing. You have to do your own thing. But what is something, what are some like takeaways or learnings that destinations or any brands should take from this campaign or this process or anything Stuart had to share with us? Adam Stoker: [00:58:17] Yeah, I would say most industries are actually me too industries. And what I mean by that is most industries will see what a couple of market leaders have done and try to copy that. And what that means is you never get the benefit of being first. You're always going to be 2nd, 3rd or 4th. And you know, I might get a little bit too deep into my philosophy here, Camden, but we look at big brands like Target and Burger King. And you know, some of these brands that really used paid media in a very effective way to get to where they are today. And then you've got thousands and thousands and thousands of organizations who are attempting to copy the model they used to get where they are today. When the timing has changed, the market has changed, the conditions have changed. And if we're trying to use Target's model to replace Target as a competitor, it's a stupid and losing battle. And so what, what Myrtle Beach did here, that was really, really interesting that I think other organizations, regardless of whether it's a tourism destination or whether it's a, you know SAS company, whether it's an e-commerce company, is if we have competitors, the chances of us duplicating their tactics and actually winning are slim to none. So we're going to have to do something that's different, which means we can't just be the me-to-follow-on advertisers. We've got to be willing to try something that's a little bit different. And that's one of the most important things I think in marketing in general, is especially once digital marketing hit and there was paid search and Facebook ads and SCO and all of this stuff, everything actually became really kind of formulaic, and B2B for example, in anybody that's trying to sell B2B, usually it's the same concept. Like we're trying to create valuable content. We're going to get that content because we want to get your email address so that we can continue to send you content and ultimately sell you something right? Like that is that is kind of the B2B formula. And my question is if somebody else has already perfected that and there's already a market leader using those tactics, do we really believe that we're going to duplicate our way to relevance? And I just don't think that's realistic. I think we've got to be trying something different and especially if we're on a limited budget, copying a competitor with more funding might be one of the dumbest things that we can do. Camden Bernatz: [01:00:47] Yeah. Yeah. The black and white, it's when you put white that. It's like, oh yeah, why would I try to do that? But you're right. It does happen a lot and especially I think people were just maybe less experienced and looking for a win or to please their boss. Like, look, this thing happened. This is a trend, let's do that. I think when one of the main takeaways that I took from, this is even beyond just the Mitarry Best campaign. But I think Myrtle Beach as a whole has done this pretty well in other areas as a collective effort is to have a brand as a destination. A destination, you've talked about touchpoints, you have the book, you wrote touch points, plug for the book go get that. Adam Stoker: [01:01:27] Available on Amazon. Camden Bernatz: [01:01:28] There you go. Yeah, links in the description. A brand cannot control all of its touchpoints to the level that like a private company can. No one can fully control on any of their touchpoints. People will have different things that happen but to the degree you can influence and harness and direct your touch points in a unified direction, you have a strong brand. And the destination is made up of other brands that operate there. They have different experiences, sports teams, attractions, weather, all kinds of things that are kind of beyond their control. And a lot of destinations I think struggle to as a DMO or CDV. So we can run marketing, we can highlight our stakeholders or hotels, whatever. But what is our brand as a geographic area, this imaginary line that's drawn on the ground? What is that? And a lot of them struggle with that. And Visit Myrtle Beach has done a good job of being like this is something that you're going to have whether you love us, hate us, or not going to visit us, or are going to visit us. You can have a certain feeling to oh, yeah, they're those guys that do that clever stuff that did that AI stuff, that do those Life's a Beach podcasts. Like they have that kind of funny, humorous, light-hearted approach that is reflective of what they call the beach just like in “Like the beach is a concept.” Anyways now here is pitching Myrtle Beach, but they've done a good job establishing a brand. And so I think that's, that's something I would, if I was a destination take away from that is I don't have to do an AI campaign necessarily. But what is, how do people recognize me? Not just that one theme park in my location, not just the one hotel, or the one lake, or whatever. As a whole, what am I known for? If I don't know what that is. I need some brand strategy. Adam Stoker: [01:03:07] Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And the thing that I, you know, plug in the book again, but the thing that mentioned in my book is if you do a good job with the touch points that you have the ability to control, you can have influence over the touch points that you don't have the ability to control. So, you know, you talked about Myrtle Beach. I think one of the things that's really interesting is they control so much of the touch points or so many of the touch points that they have. And what that results in is when somebody's having a conversation, peer to peer, that Myrtle Beach isn't involved in, that conversation goes better because of the brand that they've built than it would otherwise. And so I think that goes far beyond just a destination too, is how do people feel when they hear the name of your organization and every interaction that you have with the outside world is going to shape how people feel about you. And I think it's really important to control as many of those touchpoints, whether it's the consumer experience, whether it's the website experience. And, you know, I've seen a lot of people say, well, I don't need a really nice website because we have so much business coming in right now and it's like, well, that's great, but it doesn't change the fact that your website is a touch point and somebody that went to your website and saw that it's garbage, might not be willing to pay as much for your product as they would have otherwise, right? So, I think there's a lot of situations where we undervalue touch points that don't seem to be consumer-facing when in reality they all make up our brand. Camden Bernatz: [01:04:39] Yeah, they can be make or break. You can have a bad touch point that you didn't think was a focus that can negatively put you in someone's mind. I'm trying to remember the name of the restaurant. I was in Myrtle Beach when I was there. I need to talk to Stuart. We went down there and you weren't with us. And there was that bacon. We sent you a picture of that. Like they had this big thick bacon. Adam Stoker: [01:05:00] Yes. Camden Bernatz: [01:05:00] It was like hanging on hooks like they brought it out like this whole display. That was the best. I don't think that they call it bacon or pork belly. They had some name for it anyway. Adam Stoker: [01:05:11] But I really appreciate, yeah, I appreciate you bringing that up since I got COVID the day before. We were all supposed to go out there together and you guys ate that bacon without me. So thank you for that. Camden Bernatz: [01:05:20] Can I go back? I think about it often. Well, I don't thank you for being on today and sharing your insight and, and discussing this campaign with us. I appreciate you spending the time with us today, Adam Stoker: [01:05:30] Camden. Thank you. I really enjoyed being on the show and I got to say what you've done so far is pretty impressive, you know. I feel pretty grateful that I can be a guest for a second time on the show with the caliber of guests that you've been able to get on. I think you've built quite the show in a short period of time and I'm excited to see where it goes. Camden Bernatz: [01:05:47] Thank you. Yeah, we've been very fortunate. Thank you very much for being on, and for those who have tuned in today. Hopefully, you've enjoyed it as well. We encourage you to like and subscribe the podcast. Stay tuned for more guests like Adam and Stuart Butler and all these people we've had on recently. And we will have more stuff coming your way soon. We'll see you next time. Adam Stoker: [01:06:11] All right, everybody. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Brands and Campaigns. It's an incredible new show. They don't just talk about destination marketing. They're going to talk about some of the coolest campaigns that you've ever seen. In fact, another episode, I don't know if you guys remember, but during the Super Bowl, there was a blackout a couple of years ago in the stadium and Oreo took advantage of the opportunity and had an incredible response on Twitter. And Camden speaks with the person that was involved in that campaign as well. There's some great, great episodes, and I think you'll really enjoy checking it out. So make sure that if you haven't already that you go subscribe to Brands and Campaigns. Listen to that new show. Also, if you enjoyed today's show, don't forget to leave us a rating or a review on the Destination Marketing Podcast and get ready because we're coming back to our regularly scheduled programming next week. Thanks, everybody and have a great week. [End of transcript]