This episode covers the intricate relationship between consumer behavior and the evolving landscape of travel marketing, articulated through the lens of algorithmic insights. Larry and Chip (sitting in for normal co-host Mady Dudley) engage in a profound discussion with Seraj Bharwani from Illumin, who possesses a wealth of knowledge in the realms of digital marketing and consumer analytics. We delve into the critical necessity of addressing the prevalent challenges of planning and booking in the travel sector, particularly in light of consumer expectations for transparency and personalization. The conversation further explores the implications of long planning windows and the complexities associated with travel arrangements, emphasizing the importance of fostering meaningful connections with prospective travelers. We conclude by examining actionable strategies that can enhance destination marketing efforts, ultimately seeking to elevate the consumer experience amidst an ever-competitive marketplace.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• 00:07 - Introduction to Aqua Talks
• 02:16 - The Impact of Consumer Behavior on Travel Planning
• 13:02 - Connected Journeys and Consumer Engagement
• 20:02 - Personalization in Tourism: A New Era
• 30:23 - The Evolution of Marketing Strategies
• 37:41 - Innovative Tourism Marketing Strategies

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• This episode emphasizes the necessity for marketers to understand the evolving consumer travel behavior, particularly following the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
• A significant observation is that planning windows for travelers have lengthened considerably, often exceeding six months, which suggests a need for marketers to adapt their strategies accordingly.
• The conversation highlights the alarming statistic that over 85% of potential bookings are abandoned, indicating a critical area for improvement in the consumer journey.
• A focus on personalized marketing strategies that engage consumers throughout their planning process is crucial to minimizing cart abandonment and enhancing user experience.
• Marketers must leverage data to understand consumer preferences and behaviors, facilitating a more tailored approach to destination marketing and travel services.
• The discussion calls for greater transparency in pricing and service availability, which can help build consumer trust and lead to increased bookings.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Seraj Bharwani (Linked In)

With more than 20 years of experience in digital-first and direct-to-consumer marketing, Seraj has worked closely with CEOs and CMOs at some of the world’s most recognized brands, including American Express, Procter & Gamble, Purple, CVS Health, Blue Shield, Unilever, Nestlé, Prudential, Volkswagen, AT&T, Samsung, and Sony Pictures.

He has co-founded and scaled multiple digital advertising companies through successful exits and is driven by opportunities to build new DTC ventures and even help define entirely new industry categories.

Specialties: Growth Strategy, Direct-to-Consumer Marketing, Consulting, and Solution Selling.

Welcome to Aqua Talks, where marketing meets bold game changing ideas.

Join your hosts, Larry Aldrich and Maddie Dudley as they explore the art and science of cutting through the noise, capturing attention and fostering meaningful connections with your audience.

Whether you're a destination marketer, government contractor, or simply passionate about the transformative power of marketing, Aqua Talks offers engaging discussions, fresh insights and actionable strategies designed to inspire and inform.

Welcome to Aqua Talks, where we dive into the world of marketing.

Whether you're a seasoned marketer in hospitality, tourism or destination, whether you're in the private sector or government contracting, we talk about the insights to help elevate your marketing and grow your footprint.

Today we'll be talking with Siraj Bazwani with Illumin and Siraj has a couple other companies that he started.

He's been in this industry, he's been in this world for quite a long time.

He has a wealth of information.

So this should be a really good segment, really good conversation that we're having.

My original host, Maddie isn't here today.

She's working on some other projects.

But we have our intelligence officer, Chip, excuse me.

That we'll be working with, that will be having this conversation with us today.

Siraj, how are you doing?

I am doing just fine, Larry.

Really delighted to be here.

Thank you.

We're happy to have you today.

Chip, how are you doing today?

Everything doing great.

Not Maddie.

So sorry to the listeners and viewers out there.

I hope our numbers don't tank too bad by me being on here instead of her.

But very excited to join this conversation with Siraj.

Being in the digital space most of my life, this guy's one of the pioneers and it's great to have him on the, on the podcast with us today.

Hopefully he won't be tripping over your words like I've been doing.

No, I'll trip.

It's been an early morning, so Aqua Talks is powered by Brensis Technology, llc.

And today we're going to be talking with Siraj about the algorithmic traveler decoding desire, inspiring personalized journeys with E Tourism.

With that Siraj, let's just jump right in.

I know there were a few things that we were talking about earlier where, you know, where you wanted to kind of like start to lead this conversation.

So why don't you just jump right in and we're, we're curious to hear what you have to say.

So, yeah, Larry, this is a, this is a very interesting topic that's near and dear to me.

I love this.

And the other part of it is as much As I promised you that I would never really go anywhere close to the terms AI or intelligence or any of those words because now it's kind of out there, you know, in the world of buzz language.

Right.

Just for the audience's knowledge.

I come from the world of autonomous navigation.

That's where I have my fundamental degree in what is called pattern intelligence or machine intelligence or pattern recognition.

You name it, there are many different words for it because the history here is good.

Seventy years, kind of in the making, right?

So I was a robot scientist.

That's my background.

I did machine vision, or computer vision as it was called.

And that world, as arcane as it was, if you sort of now see it, with, you know, driverless cars running around in several US cities, frankly, it's a vision and a machine, you know, the dream that has really finally come true.

Right.

But I left that world way back in the mid-90s, because at the time the computational power was simply not there and so forth.

So I came into the world of digital marketing, digital advertising, and I found out that this was the world where there was so much data available to really identify patterns, and where I focused was on patterns of consumer behavior.

So you see the connection?

Yes.

I just want the audience to know that I took the same learnings from my own thesis that I was working on and brought it into the world of consumers.

Let's bring it closer now to travel, tourism, destination marketing.

And how is all this relevant?

Right.

So let's start by the fact that while there was a serious aberration in the trend right around Covid, when travel shut down and then it came back was called a revenge travel and all of that.

Right.

I think we are back into somewhat of a steady pattern.

Right.

But there are a few things that simply haven't changed, and I think that's.

Those are the parts that are worth paying attention to here.

First of all, planning windows for the consumers are long.

Something that has truly surprised me for the most part, frankly.

The, the, the reason is, if you look at the statistics right, 80% of the tourists who plan travel are taking more than a month to plan for it.

Actually, it ranges anywhere from a month all the way to six months, depending on how long the travel is, how far you might be going, is it local versus international, all of that.

Right.

Second, most of the tourist travel really amounts to longer stays.

These are four plus day stays.

Right.

And so these tend to be a little bit more complex.

There are more activities involved and so forth.

So clearly that's why or planning is Required.

Last year at Shop Talk, I was speaking with the CMO of Holland America, Casey Cole, and I was getting into like, okay, what's, what's, what's really so complicated about cruising and booking for cruising and really cruise travel and stuff like that.

And, and why does it take long?

And what are the channels through which you actually get those bookings, you know, and so forth.

And I found out interestingly, good half of their bookings or even more than that, really happen through travel agents and through calling.

Why?

Because it's complex, it's expensive, and people have tons of questions.

And those questions simply don't get answered in general online or in online forums and so forth.

People really need people to talk with, right?

And so those are some of the things to worry about.

And the tourists have many travel options, right?

I mean, look at this.

Here's another statistic.

Barely 25% of the people actually go to the same destination.

Repeat visits are not common.

People are exploring new options, new places to go to and so forth.

Clearly, what that means is they need more guidance, right?

And so I wanted to boil that down to a few key observations that I have.

There's one last thing, though.

I forgot about that.

The biggest red flag in anything to do with travel booking, reservations and associated activities.

Did you know, Larry, 85% north of 85% of the people who end up within a booking environment, what is cart, so to speak, abandoned.

Over 85% card abandonment.

This is crazy.

I was talking with the SVP of TripAdvisor.

They reach 400 million people annually for booking.

For such high abandonment, this is just absolutely crazy.

And so here's the upshot.

What does all of this mean?

Right?

What this means is a ton of questions that consumers have in the process of planning and booking and so forth simply remain unanswered, which is seriously a problem.

Number two, there's a lot of room for offering education and transparency.

Look at the online forums.

Significant number of complaints are associated with lack of price transparency, rate transparency, lack of what services are really available, what they qualify for and when, under what circumstances, right?

And then there is a lot of room for also offering a little bit more personalized.

People want to know that whoever they are dealing with, doing business with actually understands at least something about them so that they can make it a little bit more relevant.

All of those things sound like commonsensical, but to have so many issues in this particular environment, it just doesn't seem right.

There's just a lot of room for improvement.

That's basically what I see right now in this business that's, that's a, that's.

A lot to absorb at the moment.

So that's takes a lot of research and a lot of insight and that's never really looked at it that way.

And thanks for bringing that to our attention.

So that's something that will definitely do disagree though.

No, no, no.

Do you think differently?

No.

When you think about it, I, I do agree.

And that insight is thought provoking, actually.

Very.

You know, you can kind of carry along the same turn there because, you know, that amount of abandonment obviously presents some opportunities.

So what opportunities do you see in destination marketing given the prevailing trends in consumer travel behavior, particularly North America?

I mean, it makes more sense particularly for international travel.

You talk of price transparency.

A lot of countries, for example, you just go to the store and you see a.

Not that you're going to go on vacation and buy a TV, but if you see a TV and let's say it's €1,000, that's the price you're going to pay when you walk out the store.

All the taxes and everything else, the fees are baked into that.

So I can understand the side where you're talking.

The consumer might have some hesitation about the transparency because.

Yeah, we have resort fees and tourism tax and all the other elements that might be on top of that.

So you.

Yeah.

What opportunities do you see for, for possibly addressing that or possibly in that situation, increasing click through the purchase instead of abandoning the cart?

Yeah, I think some of the things that we have been trying to solve for, like there is no silver bullet chip, you know that.

Right.

So you can progressively get to addressing these things so that you get improvement over time.

Right.

One of the things that on our side that we have been looking at is really you want to get as close to the consumer as you can and get them for them to be participating in the dialogue.

The more you know about the consumer and the more you learn from them when they are in the journey towards, of planning for travel.

Right.

And I'm using here journey as a metaphor.

Right.

More in terms of like you're going over time, you're interacting, planning, you know, and so forth.

You're seeking advice from different people, including the brand you want to work with.

The idea is, which we believe in, is if you can get into some sort of a participative dial where there is a progressive discovery that's happening over time, you are anticipating some things because of a little bit, you know, about the consumer or the user, they are providing you some More information about where they are right now, because clearly that's going to be more accurate, right.

Any data that I may have collected on a typical user will most likely be old.

It'll be a week old, a month old, six months old, depending on the source from where I got the data.

Right.

If they were interacting with some other websites and I established their preference, well, is that preference still relevant today?

And I think you're always kind of, you know, there's room for error there, there's.

You could be out of context, right.

And so when I use the term connected journeys, what I mean by that is you want to be in that progressive connection over vertical and a variety of touch points, right?

So that every time you interact with the user they are giving you a little bit more and you reach them the next time they give you a little bit more.

And so as you collect that information, you really are able to truly customize what it is that they are looking for.

You're clarifying it, you're providing truly relevant guidance just in time.

And therefore, by the time you reach the cart, it isn't any type of, you know, disconnect of sorts.

You know that there are no missed expectations.

You know, there is all sorts of things that usually end up being, it's like, oh, I wish I hadn't done it.

Well, no you wouldn't because you were party to that.

You made the choices.

So the more you can get the user to be more participative, the less the room for that type of abandonment that you see at the tail end of it.

And so that's why the whole idea of connected journeys that we brought to the table, or frankly, we aren't the only ones, there are many other companies that are talking about it now, but five years ago we brought something to life and there are solutions like that available in the market that help you progressively get better on that front.

Consumer behavior has become fluid with the choices, the available choices influenced by many factors and trade offs and aspirations of affordability.

What's noble today about consumer interests and preferences in the state of the art data and algorithms?

Yeah, I think, I think here I would say that there are a few things that we have known all along which are the predominant signals that marketers have been using and highly relevant to tourism, tourism marketers in general.

And that's demographics that are easily accessible.

Past behavior is accessible, preferences are accessible.

Context and intent, those are the predominant signals that we have normally had.

But I think the way to think about it is that there is no real expectation from the consumer that whoever is interested in doing business with them know everything about them up front.

As a matter of fact, it's highly risky to communicate with a user and let them know that you know just about anything there is to know about them.

It's just scary.

I don't like it.

I hate it when a marketer reaches out to me.

I'll tell you, I'll give you an example.

I was in Miami a few months ago.

I was in a restaurant with a client.

I paid the bill, I came out, got in the car.

Just as I was turning on the ignition to the car, I received a message.

And the message was from one of the hotel brands.

They actually told me that I had just received a bunch of reward points completely sort of unrelated in my mind from what it had to do with my purchase at the restaurant and the bill I just paid.

It turns out that this was a partnership between.

Now I have to express the brands because it's not going to make any sense what I'm saying.

It was Marriott and American Express that had behind the scenes made a partnership where if I pay something with my American Express card, I receive reward points on my Marriott Bonvoy points because of that restaurant transaction.

Now I'm saying how in the world did Marriott Bonboy figure out that I had done this transaction with my American Express card?

I had no notice, there was no notification, the brand never told me.

And so you see, even though from both of these brands perspective it was supposed to be a positive news, I should be excited that something good happened to me, that I earned more reward points without me asking for it explicitly or what have you.

It just made me pause a little bit.

It's like how much do they really know about me and what I do in any given day?

Right.

You see where I'm going with that.

It's like knowing too much and knowing a lot isn't necessarily an expectation.

It can sometimes be negative.

And so when you ask me the question, what's knowable?

My hope is that ultimately we'll get to a point of the scenario that I described earlier.

This idea of progressive discovery where you are using some information to guide the user, but you are also getting them to contribute to that dialogue and giving you the info so that they feel like I gave the info.

Because I know there is benefit, there is a quid pro quo associated with that whole relationship.

Larry, you understand where I'm going, right?

Yes.

Okay, so that's one part.

But there is tremendous amount of improvement that could be made even in the first interaction, by the way, I have two more ideas on that front.

And these are all recent advancements and probably, probably the past three to five years.

And I think you will see more of this.

One is what I refer to as cohort based personalization.

What that is is very simple and it's the whole idea behind labeled data and chip.

You are familiar with all of the latest advancements in AI and you've been looking at that.

And the best thing I can do is to relate the experience we all have with Netflix.

Why is it that the Netflix recommendations tend to work, tend to be relevant?

Because tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people are consuming content.

And based on the grouping and the label data that they have, if people did XYZ things, they would want that.

There is labeling that's associated with the data.

There is a clear correlation in behavior.

Okay, now let me apply this example to tourism.

Imagine this, all right, Smoky Smoky Mountains National Park.

It was interesting for me to discover as I was doing some research recently for one of the DMOs.

Over 12 million people go there every year.

That's a lot of people going to one destination.

Imagine if we had labeled data on correlation.

These people who go there, they do these types of media consumption, they go to these types of channels, they end up in this particular locations within the Smoky Mountains and they follow through with other behaviors post visit to all of these places, just like Netflix.

Okay, if you had label data like that, imagine what you could do in terms of the level of guidance, advice that you could actually provide.

As a matter of fact, Smoky Mountain Resort could actually have its own AI chatbot where you could come in, interact with it, and based on what other people have actually done, it could really bring you some amazingly relevance, thoughts, ideas in terms of what you could do the next time you come there, right?

Okay, that's at a more brand level.

Now carry that thing further.

Just the generative AI overall, you know, like the chatbots, you know, they're out there like chat gps, Gemini, all of these things, right?

This will be the final frontier in the way that when a prompt is issued, I let's say I'm interested in going to some destination, right?

I am providing so much information, I'm providing intent, I'm providing my requirement, I'm providing context, I'm providing my expectations, I'm setting all the variables in terms of I'm going with four people, I'm going with friends, I'm going, you know, these are the things I actually want to do.

One single request Everything packaged together.

Imagine how many things you can actually deliver in one pass.

Literally what I earlier described to you as a connected journey is compressed into just one or two interactions.

This is absolutely nuts in terms of what is coming to us, you know, in what is possible and creative generated on the fly to give you the message that's also relevant with the right visuals all happening in real time.

Now, what's the holdup?

The holdup is none of these chatbots have yet figured out what the real model is for the brands to engage.

That has yet to be figured out.

We are clearly a few years away.

But what is possible is a whole next level of personalization that's going to happen and how much is knowable.

But the interesting part, Larry, on this thing, and I'm referring to you, Chip as well, interesting part is it's how much information the consumer is willing to provide to you.

We're not making any expectations in terms of what the brand needs to know in advance.

This is how we've always thought about it in the past.

And here is the user willing to give you that info.

And so what you can do on the basis of that is what we need to figure out.

Now that's a whole different set of responsibility that the brands now will have and what can you do for them.

When you know this much info, you.

Know, you speak to that and it brings a whole different level of personalization.

And it gets, it gets around because the consumer's providing it.

It gets around the issue of, of what you were speaking to earlier, where all of a sudden someone just goes, surprise, I know all this information about you.

Well, if you're having a con and people look at AIs differently, you know how many people, the whole thing came up in the news recently.

How many megawatts of power are used for people just saying thank you to the, hey, I can't help it when it solves a problem for me or fixes some code or something.

Thank you.

It's just something you do.

But I'm gonna play devil's advocate for a minute and flip it, flip it completely.

So we talk about that personalization And I agree 100%, I think, you know, that level of data we're gonna get provided by the consumer to help them.

It's win, win right in that scenario.

But let's just play devil's advocate.

So does the personalization really matter?

You know, we've been taking, we've been talking about this for seemingly decades.

Much more so in the last, in the last decade anyway.

So to what extent can the consumer journey be truly unique at an individual level?

Yeah.

So just because something is doable doesn't mean it is worth doing.

That's where you're coming from, Chip.

I love that kind of conversation, right.

There are tons of things we can do, but does anybody care?

And does it even matter?

Right.

And I think here, I think it matters to an extent.

Yes, to an extent.

As I said, the part that I usually have problems with are the things like referring to communications, like, hey, Chip, kind of communications, right?

It's like just cosmetic fix, right?

It's like, I believe that it's truly personal, but fundamentally there isn't really anything that is truly relevant or, like, tailored to me.

Right.

That part I have a problem with.

And I just don't continue those types of dialogues.

Just as a consumer, when somebody reaches out to me like that, it's just a little fake, Right.

On the other hand, take a look at what Tennessee tourism has actually done in a couple of their campaigns that they did.

It's just fabulous what they did.

Just take a look at what they did.

There's a great example.

What they did is they recognized that the types of people who would be most excited about visiting Tennessee are the people who are nature lovers, people who are music enthusiasts, and people who are really more into family fun.

Okay?

They bucketed them into, like three large groups, right?

Then what they decided to do is they found all the things that are fun for these types of people.

And so, like, you know, I mentioned earlier about the Sumoki Mountains, right?

And so it's like the national park where there are a million different things you can actually do.

It's probably the best, most visited place right.

In the country.

And so they come up with nice examples of things these people can do, the nature lovers can do.

And so put those activities on the side for a second.

Then they found music enthusiasts who love countries, blues, rock and roll, all of those different varieties of music, and where they could be going to consume those, the concerts they could be attending, the halls, where they actually have these things, all of that stuff, right?

And then for families, it's more about family adventure, Southern food, hospitality, all those specific things, like really classic Southern stuff, right?

And what they do from all of that, their agency created some amazingly beautiful creative treatments from that, over 2,000 variations of those treatments.

Then these communications were actually done in all those ways, in all the different channels where they knew they could reach those types of peoples based on their past behavior and the knowledge and the things that we've talked about earlier.

These guys really have truly achieved a level of personalization I'm talking about here.

This is not one to one, but this is truly at the cohort level thing and they've proven it that not only this level of personalization works, but it truly drives impact.

Like they've seen real impact both in terms of consumer spend as well as tax receipts to the state.

So you see the distinction, right?

This is not fake, this is real.

If I'm a music enthusiast, I actually want to know those things.

Yeah.

Which makes a lot of sense and kind of, you know, leads into capabilities.

You know, so what kind of, what capabilities are required to deliver a stellar consumer experience and inspire passionate evangelism?

So in this part you guys will relate with this really well.

And Chip, you know, you and I have been in business in this business for just as long as.

So hopefully this will make sense.

Like I, I bucket the developments and the innovations essentially in four eras of how we have arrived, where we have arrived and are we all doing the best of all of these things?

Not even by a long shot.

It's, it's.

We are still all work in progress here.

Right.

But start with this.

The first decade, digital, right.

We were all focused on precision.

We wanted everything to be precise in digital advertising, digital marketing.

Right.

So we were trying to solve for what we were trying to solve for unduplicated region frequency.

Right.

Just the bare bones.

Right.

That level of control is still an issue as the channels have multiplied all over the place.

Right.

So duplication is still happening.

Right.

But it's getting better.

Look, development of clean rooms and all of those things have actually improved.

You can dedupe stuff and so you can actually get relatively precise communications to the right audiences.

Right.

So we are improving.

We have come a long way there.

The next phase was prediction.

Now this was about solving the channel problem.

Where is going to be the next logical place for engagement?

If I've delivered a message to you on streaming, what's the next place you might be in?

Would I be able to find you on social?

Would I be able to find you on some other unique publisher sites or blog posts or where, where am I might actually find you?

How would I know?

Well, that was the part of the whole machine learning and the prediction.

If I know what are the logical places where you will end up and therefore I can deliver you sort of the message there.

Right.

Okay.

So that's the prediction problem.

The next decade was all about solving for that problem.

Okay.

Finally, over the last, I would say five to seven years.

It's all about persuasion.

You've heard this thing in trade press, right?

A lot.

What is the next best message I can deliver to you and how do I craft that message, how do I test for it, how do I control for it, all of those things, right?

And so that is kind of is active right now, like all this Gen AI business and discussion about how can I get creative variations, all of that stuff, right?

This is all about, okay, can we solve for the message?

How can I get control over the creative, the best creative I deliver and the right offer I deliver and what combinations I deliver with is what's being solved.

And we are kind of, kind of there, you know, maybe a third of the people are really doing and testing, you know, and all of that.

Like the Tennessee tourism that I was talking about, this is a beautiful example, right?

It's, that's it.

You can't get 2,000 variations.

You're going to need some sort of a, you know, persuasive message generation capability based on the briefs and so forth.

And then you can create that some are doing manually, others are doing it, moving on, right?

But here's the final frontier.

This is the proof of incremental growth and roi.

I'll underline incremental.

This is hard.

Now, of all the numbers that I've seen, both with clients who we have worked with and the ones who actually have gone public, numbers usually are shown in aggregate.

You know, Larry, what aggregate numbers do, it's the end of the campaign where whoever is running the campaign, who was championing it, whether CMO or whoever it was, is going to the state board and actually saying, see how great we are last year versus this year or five years ago versus this year, that kind of numbers.

The fact of the matter is, if the numbers weren't that great, what are you going to do?

It's all done.

It's behind us at this point.

So the problem we are all trying to solve for now is what I refer to as closed loop attribution and optimization, which means you want to know all of that stuff while the program is running.

And that's the problem we are trying to solve for literally right now.

This is the frontier where, you know, you've got five channels active.

Here are the three that are actually delivering better results.

And therefore I should be moving money around.

How should I do that next week and the week after?

That's the problem that we need to be able to solve.

And we really haven't completely gotten there.

As a matter of fact, these Discussions are happening right now, literally like it was last week.

I was talking with three different partners to figure all of this thing out based on actual results, actual bookings, actual visits, all of those things is what really matters.

Yeah, you speak to roi, you know, having been on the other side working in a destination, you know, that's what we could like the holy grail, you know, of destination marketing is being able to have that attribution.

And we made some baby steps along the way and some big steps, you know, Arrivalist, for example, when they came out.

Now there's other companies already, Placer, et cetera, that can do some attribution and then companies like Epsilon Conversant that are doing a track through based on attributing to a sale.

But again, it comes to those buckets.

But we haven't fully solved that.

So to that regard, you know, what are some benchmarks for ROI on budgets that you would typically allocate to advertising by the DMOs?

So here's the thing, right?

Many states don't really report these numbers publicly, but the ones that we worked with and where we have permission and numbers have been reported publicly because they've gone on stage and talked about it and so forth.

There are a few.

And I think we should, we should think through this in two ways.

There's the ROI with a clear return on whatever paid media investments have actually been done.

You can add to that also your resources, people, agency fees, everything else, because it needs to be fully bundled.

If you're going to do a real roi, you gotta account for all the different costs that go into really running your total marketing department.

Right.

One way is to really measure it in terms of commercial development, which is real consumer spending that happens in the region where you're trying to bring people.

And number two is the tax receipts, because the government really sees the impact of that on tax dollars.

Right.

There is another way also that I have seen with several states that we have worked with where the effort is to spread out the development.

So much of it.

Chip, you and Larry, you guys have actually seen Europe is just absolutely screaming nuts right now because they got issues with tourist crowding certain regions and sustainability becomes issues for them and so forth.

And therefore they are essentially increasing the fees to discourage, you know, overcrowding of certain spaces and so forth.

Right.

That's actually happening in certain states where what you're getting is people go to one or two cities and that's where most of the tourist traffic comes and the rest of the region is just barren, even though they have some beautiful environments where people could actually benefit, they'll enjoy it and so forth, but it's just not places people go to.

And so that's another way to think about how the ROI impact happens because you have broadened the impact of the tourism into the wider state and not just to just same places where everybody goes, right?

So let me go down the list of things that I've seen.

So number one, Tennessee tourism, right?

They've done a bunch of interesting campaigns.

One of the campaigns they did was called the Soundtrack of America Made in Tennessee.

Very nice campaign, right?

The ROI on that was frankly 19x.

I mean this is just incredible, right?

And the tax receipts, 11x.

The other thing that they solved for which is very interesting, very high intent for repeat, repeat visit intent.

And so because that's very hard to do, right?

People are always looking for new places to go, but if they're going to go to the same place, they have to have more things to do, right?

And so they are exposing people to more diversity, variety of things.

And therefore people have a reason to want to come back, right?

Very nice.

Pure Michigan has done some really interesting stuff.

New Mexico, true.

Visit North Carolina, all of those are really, really good campaign.

But the one that's truly noteworthy is Visit California.

One of the best campaigns.

We had a great time, but we weren't the only ones.

They had multiple vendors who participated in that whole program.

Total net investment, if I recall correctly, was really very close to 100 million.

Some numbers reported 75 million.

I believe that's under.

Underestimated this, this invested over $100 million on this program.

But the consumer spending on this was 30 over $30 billion and the tax receipts over $2 billion.

So clearly, I mean, we are talking about an ROI.

That's just crazy out there, right?

And so they've done really well.

Now, in terms of spreading commercial impact, there are two programs that we've actually done which were purely with that expectation.

Bahamas Tourism and Visit North Carolina.

Now, interestingly for Bahamas, most of the travel, 90 plus percent of the tourists actually go to only two places, Nassau and Freeport.

That's it.

There are 14 other islands.

Beautiful beaches, like truly virgin beaches.

People would love it, nice hotel properties over there.

Clearly investments have been made, but not many people go there.

And so our goal was to truly deliver nice custom, creative treatments with journeys to guide people to go visit those other islands, North Carolina, same way people go to the same places, but they don't go into the woods.

There are some nice adventuresome places.

Beautiful, you Know, countryside, all of that stuff.

But unless you really give people the incentive, they want to try.

So with North Carolina in particular, it was a very special offer that they provided.

There was a, it was a, there was a price promotion sort of issued along with that that you could actually win a trip to, to the woods and so forth, like fully paid.

And so that program did extremely well.

It got people to expose to other places within, within the Carolinas, which the client was really excited about.

And they even went upstage, you know, on I think one of the conferences last year to talk about it.

So, yeah, we're delighted.

Some of those programs actually work.

So these are different ways that states have actually seen results.

But it's hard.

It takes a lot of work.

It just takes very thoughtful effort from partners like yourself.

I mean, you guys are in this and you've done this work for a long time.

Takes a lot of experience and creativity to really make a difference.

Yeah.

And a lot of time and like you were saying, a lot of work that has to be put in and, and it's fun.

We enjoy doing it.

We continue to look for new and innovative ways, especially talking to you.

You've brought a lot of really good thought provoking, as I mentioned, information earlier, which we definitely want to continue this conversation and continue conversations with you.

We're always looking for new ideas, ways to help our marketing, help our clients, actually bring partners in to help our clients also.

So this was, this was a great conversation and really want to look forward to having more conversation with you.

I think there's a lot that we could talk about and actually put in the plan in action later down the road.

So thank you for being with us.

Of course.

Of course.

No, Larry Ship.

This was a great discussion.

Oh yeah, I'd like to.

We could do about 10 minutes of this.

Man, we could definitely continue this.

We could keep going all day.

Great, great conversation.

Yeah.

So thanks for being with us, Siraj.

Again, thank you for being on Aqua Talks and watching this episode.

To learn more about Siraj, go to aquatox.com you can get more information on Aqua Marketing Communications, Brentz's technology.

Definitely a lot more with Siraj.

We're going to have a lot more with him.

We'll have his bio on there and his contacts.

Thank you for being with us and we'll see you soon.

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