Wisconsin Dept. of Tourism
Nothing beats having the opportunity to advertise your home state to new and return visitors. Our strategic foundation was dead simple, Wisconsin is fun. Sure, we have the picturesque vistas and the outdoor activities but many of our neighbors offer the same. The difference, according to visitors, is that Wisconsin is more fun. It’s a state that doesn’t take itself seriously, it’s quirky as hell and if you ask someone next to you at a bar they won’t just tell you what it is, they’ll offer you a taste. The following is the work we created with the state over the course of the four years I oversaw the creative.
We created a giant hourglass at Chicago’s Union Station, filled it with leaves, and over the course of 30 days, timed the leaf drops to coincide with peak fall color viewing in the state.
The Selfie Stand
To encourage visitors to post more pictures of our state to social channels, we create physical markers of the most beautiful locals and equipped them with phone holders. As you’ll see, all it took to fill the feeds with pics was a little encouragement.
We’ve got a festival for everything
If you visit Wisconsin in the summer, you’ll quickly reason that we’ll throw a festival for nearly anything. Cranberries, cheese, beef-o-rama, heck we have a fest just because it’s summer. To launch our festival campaign we had former Packer Donald Driver as our emcee of a huge festival taking viewers through all the sites and sounds of a good time. Outside of TV, we created festival mashups for OOH and digital banners along with a digital campaign quizzing potential visitors on if the festival we named was a real fest or fictional. Spoiler alert, no matter how absurd the fest sounded, it was, in fact a real festival in the state.
Are you in or are you out?
Fall and Winter in Wisconsin offer some unique getaway opportunities. Fall color viewing, beautiful hikes, cozy cabins. ski runs, the list goes on and on whether your an indoor person or an outdoor fanatic. To tell the story, we enlisted a state favorite, former Packer Donald Driver, to invite visitors to enjoy the seasons.
Meet the Thompson Family
For 50 years, the Thompson family gathered at the same lake, at the same cabin, on the same weekend in Wisconsin. After their long form content video garnered thousands and thousands of views and hundreds of questions of ‘where is this?’ we decided to build a campaign out of their story with TV spots telling the story of their traditions, print, social, OOH, and 360 videos of the Northwoods, including one that placed viewers in the middle of the lake as the family tried to sink the raft.
There are a million things to do in Wisconsin.
We were introduced to an extraordinary individual named Matt Scott a few years ago while trying to find a way to tell the story of how accessibility. Matt’s an Olympic gold medalists, professional wheelchair basketball player and has an infectious personality. With Matt as our spokesman, we wanted to remind visitors of all the fun things to do in the state and to not let excuses get in the way of a good time.
A state of Gemütlichkeit
Gemütlichkeit, it’s a German word that means warmth, friendliness and good cheer. Or, in other words, all the things that make Wisconsin so inviting. We took our state’s Germanic roots and amped it up to show the ultimate Oktoberfest party.
