Camden Bernatz (00:00:00) - 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.
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 and Visit Myrtle Beach. So, Adam, welcome back to the show.
Adam Stoker (00:00:38) - Thanks for having me, Camden. I'm glad to be back.
Camden Bernatz (00:00:40) - Glad to have you. So 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 in the, the current zeitgeist of all things AI, right? And we, I know internally that our agency 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 (00:01:12) - Yeah, 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. 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.
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 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's that innovative and unique.
Then the separate, the second thing that I found really interesting in this conversation is that when AI really kind of came out last year, 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. 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?
So to have Visit Myrtle Beach, who is 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. I think that speaks to the willingness and in full disclosure, Stuart and I are really good, really close friends. And so, 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 new worthy because they've been done, because they've been tried.
Camden Bernatz (00:04:14) - Exactly. That's something I wanted to comment on. Like, I totally agree with you as far as the, 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 be 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 (00:05:04) - Yeah, 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 or into ChatGPT. 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? I think in any situation from a marketing perspective instead of saying that didn't work, and instead asking the question, how can we use this, could probably help us not stifle what, what can be innovation or greatness by working within the confines of what we've done before.
Camden Bernatz (00:05:59) - 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 refer referencing back to the conversation with Stuart part of this campaign is they built a landing page. So a part of the Visit Myrtle Beach website has this welcome mat of visit or 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’t. But well, going to say is it was still, 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 as 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 outdoor recreation, all this stuff. You can still kind of get an interesting insight like, hey, obviously this is kind of a silly AI thing, but Myrtle Beach actually seem interesting. I should keep clicking around and figure out what there is to do.
Adam Stoker (00:07:05) - 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 fail 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, that came from AI it was newsworthy because nobody else had done anything like this. And, 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.
So for a lot of us, as we think about trying new things, I think there's a lot of fear. What if 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 in a business organization, it's, well, what's my director going to think? What's the CMO going to think? And 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'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 (00:08:40) - 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 weren’t 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 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 have 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, 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 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 (00:09:38) - 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 an 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 ChatGPT, 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 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 oh, PS, 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 risk but they chose innovation and I think it really paid off.
Camden Bernatz (00:11:43) - 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 a looking for strategy recommendation. 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 fulfill 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 anything you have, not every idea is a winner obviously, but being open to that captures things like this. No one can preemptively plan something like this. It had to be a, I wonder what AI would say, and just 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 that the value of being a client that's open to getting ideas of things you didn't ask for.
Adam Stoker (00:13:11) - 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, here's what we want to do, here's the type of campaign we want to run and we're looking for a fulfillment partner. But when all you're looking for is a fulfillment partner, what you lose is innovation and ideation. Then at some point, you're asking the question, well, why don't we just do this in-house?
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 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 (00:14:37) - Yeah. Yeah, that's 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 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 collaboration and timing and things like that. Jumping again to, so we talked a lot about the process of what went into this thinking about the result, which in tourism 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 and 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 a 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 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 (00:15:53) - Well, so this is where you got to go back to the marketing funnel and understand what their goals and objectives were with the campaign. So when we look at the marketing funnel, we have awareness, consideration and purchase. 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 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 seeing, buy buy buy buy buy. You're seeing. Here's a couple of podcasts that we have. Here's a couple of 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 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. Sorry, 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 the 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 (00:18:39) - 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 that starts with some paid media like we, like Stuart talked about you still use that. But then if 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 priding providing value and giving 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, 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 (00:19:38) - 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 SaaS is another great example if I'm tied up in a contract for the rest of this year, and I've got a SaaS 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 (00:20:57) - You’re starting to bug me. I don't like you anymore.
Adam Stoker (00:20:58) - 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 (00:21:11) - Hm. 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 or lessons or takeaways for other brands, maybe particularly in the destination marketing space in this case, does 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 (00:21:48) - 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 fourth. 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 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 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 SaaS 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-too 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 SEO and all of this stuff, everything actually became really kind of formulaic and B to B for example, in anybody that's trying to sell B to B 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 kind of the B to B 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 (00:24:18) - Hm. Yeah. Yeah. The black and white it’s when you put it like 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 talked about touch points, you have the book, you wrote Touchpoints, plug for the book, go get that.
Adam Stoker (00:24:57) - Available on Amazon.
Camden Bernatz (00:24:59) - There you go. Yeah, link it in the description. We a brand cannot control all of its touch points to the level that like a private company can, no one can fully control on any of their touch points. 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. The destination is made up of other brands that operate there. They have different experiences, sports teams, attractions, where there are all kinds of things that are kind of beyond their control, and a lot of destinations I think struggle to as a DMO or a CVB. 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.
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 you 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 of Beach podcasts. Like they have that kind of funny, humorous, lighthearted approach that is reflective of what they call the beach, just like in quotation marks. Like the beach is a concept. Anyways, now I'm 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, what, 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 hit some brand strategy.
Adam Stoker (00:26:38) - Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And the thing that I 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 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. What that results in is when somebody is 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.
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. I think it's really important to control as many of those touch points, whether it's the consumer experience, whether it's the website experience. 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 products 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 (00:28:09) - Yeah, they can be make or break. You can have a, 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. 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. Anyways.
Adam Stoker (00:28:41) - I don’t know. 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 (00:28:51) - Gotta go back? I think about it often. Well, I don't thank you for being on today, and sharing your insight, and discussing this campaign with us. I appreciate you spending the time with us today.
Adam Stoker (00:29:01) - Camden, thank you. I really enjoyed being on the show and I got to say what you've done so far is pretty impressive. 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 (00:29:17) - 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.
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