VISIT CENTRAL OREGON
Adventure Calls
Turning destination marketing into something we could actually measure.
Destination marketing usually spends on brand and hopes people show up. We wanted to close the loop.
The Challenge
The Insight
The Strategy
My Role
What We Built
Central Oregon needed to grow visitation from key direct-flight markets while competing against destinations with larger budgets. The challenge wasn't only creating compelling work. We needed to understand what actually moved someone from seeing Central Oregon to visiting it.
Travel decisions rarely happen after one ad. They build across multiple exposures, stories, searches, and moments of consideration. If we could see that journey more clearly, we could make better decisions about both content and media.
We grounded the campaign in focus groups across key direct-flight markets, then built a long-form storytelling platform that gave people more than a scenic montage. Underneath it, we created a measurement system designed to connect the content journey to physical visitation.
I led marketing strategy, research, campaign development, budget allocation, partnerships, and measurement for Visit Central Oregon.
Adventure Calls became a four-season series created with a National Geographic photographer, using 30-minute episodes to introduce the people, landscapes, and culture of Central Oregon.
We tagged campaign touchpoints at the anonymized device level so we could see what people were served, what they engaged with, what they passed over, and the sequence of touchpoints before conversion. Geofencing then helped confirm when exposed audiences actually arrived in Central Oregon.
The Result
The broader marketing strategy contributed to 567% growth in regional tourism revenue over five years. Adventure Calls and related work earned Oregon Travel & Tourism Industry Achievement recognition, while the attribution system gave the organization a clearer view of the path from marketing exposure to actual visitation.