AI and Destination Marketing

In this insightful episode of the Travel Marketing Podcast, hosted by Propellic, we sit down with Janette Roush, the Executive Vice President of Marketing and Digital at New York City Tourism and Conventions. Janette, a leader in the Destination Marketing Organization (DMO) space, shares her innovative approaches to integrating AI into her team's marketing strategies. We discuss the future of destination marketing, the importance of storytelling, and the challenges of measuring the impact of marketing efforts in a city as dynamic as New York. Janette also delves into the evolving role of AI in creative processes and leadership, providing valuable insights for marketers 

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This was a fun episode. I just had a chance to talk to Janette Roush, who's the executive vice president of marketing and digital at New York City Tourism and Conventions. And she is without a doubt the most AI driven marketer in the DMO, the Destination Marketing Organization space. She is at the forefront of it and I really enjoyed my opportunity to talk to Janette about what she's doing to instill use of new technologies within her team to inspire them to use it and to just manage a larger organization specifically for a destination in this case.

Janette and I met and we were both interviewed on a podcast with Arrival, the experience of this podcast and I was just so impressed by everything she had to say, so I had to have her on.
So we'll just jump right in.

Okay. Well, thank you for joining me today. Super excited to dive in, we've kind of like shared a similar space online for the past six months. And I keep seeing your name, so it's only about time that we get this scheduled and recorded.
So I know a lot of the work that you've been doing is in and around AI. Obviously, you have an advertising background. That's what our listeners are, they're marketers that are building businesses and travel and tourism. So I think that we'll hit on that and then a little bit around the AI tangentially and also focused a little bit later on in the conversation just to see how you're leveraging it and what's working and what's not. Before we dive right in, I want to talk about destination marketing as a whole because that's where you focus. So tell me, over the next… five, 10 years, you're clearly on the bleeding edge of things.
Where do you see destination marketing changing?

Oh, that's a great question. Like we're definitely the core work looking at our missions, which are typically going to be, you know, spreading the economic benefits of tourism throughout your destination, questions about over tourism and what does that mean for different destinations, like that question is very different for New York city than it's going to be for benefits, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, questions about how are we telling the story of our destinations. Like, I think this is core to our work and I think what's going to happen is we're going to continue to do these things, but all of the changes to Google search and discoverability of the content that we create, like that's the piece that is going to radically change in the next five to 10 years. If you're a little less discoverable on Google than you used to be, or if your content is discoverable but not with your name attached to it. What does that mean? What does that mean for the work of a DMO, which I think can sometimes be a bit invisible. Like I don't know how often the consumer thinks about DMOs.
I would guess probably never.
Yeah, for those of us who are unfamiliar with DMOs, DMOs are a type of organization that are tasked with the impossible task of generating tourism with absolutely no easy way to attribute the impact of work that they're doing.

Exactly.

Okay, so I think also what you're speaking about was actually what we talked about and we're just like diving right into the thick of it, there was like no introduction at all, but last time we were speaking, I think what we had talked about on the experience the show was it was like two or three days before the AIO reviews feature was released on Google, which is when you say like the way Google is changing, and are you going to get attribution for that, I guess, you know, that's kind of really what we're talking about.
I saw a couple of days ago, they added links back in to the top of AI overviews. Did you see that?

I haven't seen an AI overview probably in two weeks.

They compressed it a lot. I wonder why.

I have no idea.

Maybe it was telling people to eat glue.

Yeah. Or the raw milk.It could be that.

I love that Google's specific statement around that was like, people are searching wrong, not that the AI overviews are saying something wrong, but people are searching wrong. Okay.
So destination marketing, it's changing substantially given the circumstances, it's very hard to track. People don't really know what's going on in the background unless they're working inside that DMO. In destination marketing, how do you describe like a good marketer? What would be some qualities of a good destination marketer?

I'd say an excellent storyteller, able to go in and not just report back on metrics, which are of course incredibly important. I think being, having acuity with data, is every bit as important as being that good storyteller. But don't read a list of, you know, how many clicks did these ads give? Because even though we don't easily have other ways to report the impact of our work, it's still not going to be clicks. So digging in to figure out what are the insights that we can share, like if we're reporting on our work, to be able to report back to our stakeholders, to our CEOs, to our boards, what we're doing. Like that's the tricky thing that separates, I think a good from a great destination marketer is, how are you able to take numbers and to take these metrics that don't always immediately correlate to that visit and still find this story.

So it's like, it's stakeholder communications and management being a key role.
Probably given that you have 800 stakeholders, whereas most private businesses have one.
Right.

How many people are in your reporting structure reporting into you?

Right now, probably 20. We've been doing a little bit of restructuring, so.

So you take the work of 20 people and produce like an annual report, right? On the impact of the work that you're doing. When you craft that story, like what is the process of taking data
and impact and making it into a story for stakeholders. Tell me, walk me through that, how you think about those things.

Well, it starts for me with just kind of collecting everything in one place. And then to turn tying it back to the why we did it. So I'm going to like go back a few years for an example, but we did a partnership with the Warner Brothers for the film In the Heights. And this was something we were actually planning before the pandemic.
And then pandemic, the movie was pushed off a year. And so we had to rethink everything we were doing around this partnership. And what we ended up doing was launching a content hub on our website called the Latino Experience and NYC at the same time that we launched our official partnership with the film and nights. And so we were able to take the launch of the film which would have been, you know, some content on the website some things to promote on our homepage. We have access to some out of home media throughout the five boroughs that we get through our city relationships that we would have promoted it there. And it has been like a nice little partnership, but we were able to make it more than the sum of its parts because we launched or relaunched our Washington Heights landing page experience on our website with a lot more content than we might've otherwise, along with this new content hub about how can you find Latino-owned businesses in the five boroughs?
If you're looking for these specific experiences or wanting to dive into Dominican culture versus Puerto Rican culture in the five boroughs, how could you do that? And so we launched all of these elements at the same time. And then it ended up getting a large story in, I think it was the Wall Street Journal. So for us, the storytelling, it's hard for us to say because we did a partnership within the Heights, we increased visitation to Washington Heights by X percent.

Yeah.

That would be difficult to drill down into.

Is that a question you get from stakeholders? I mean, I would imagine it is like how many people, I guess less sophisticated at newer ones, people like new businesses they all are affiliated with. How frequently do you have to like reposition the question of how many people did this drive? Is that a frequent question you get?

I think our stakeholders understand that it's a large destination. That is just really difficult to drill down into and it's very hard to do real time. So we work with tech tourism economics on all of our reporting and all of our, you know, like economic that type of research. And it is, you know, you get the numbers updated three times a year.
So it's not a, oh, the thing you did last time, what did you drive?

Is it like trailing for the previous year or is it the past quarter that you get the data for?

Oh, trailing, it's an update on projections. So we update what is the next three years look like that will update three times a year.

This is definitely like the best data agency in this space. That's awesome to hear that. So I wanna talk a little bit more, you're in leadership at a marketing organization. I think that's gonna be a really helpful.
I think specifically in the context of all the work that you're doing in AI and just for all the listeners, Janette is definitely at the front of it, specifically in the destination space leveraging AI every single day I see an update on your LinkedIn and it's actually meat. It's valuable meat. It's not fluff. So I want to hear a little bit more about how you're taking what you're learning, which is a lot, and instilling it into those 20 people reporting into you. Because that I think as a leader myself is one of the hardest things I deal with. It's when I get excited about something and I can see an opportunity, I struggle sometimes to get it to be adopted. So how are you doing that?

I think a big part of it is just being very transparent with how you are using it yourself. And so when I do a large project or even if I answer an email and I use AI to answer a question within the email, I will then say at the bottom of that email or at the point where I used it, I'm like, yes, this is the prompt that I used. This is what I did to come up with this particular result.
So if it's just as an internal email, for me that's an opportunity to walk through the steps of that particular process. So I try to always do that if I'm using generative AI in a particular way at work.

I want to celebrate that in the way you just shared that because AI is generally adapted and adopted in the context of email as a way to save time and a way to not do as much work. And then you're going above and beyond and communicating it, adding work. That's exceptional leadership. That's someone who deeply cares about their team. Do you find that gets a question back or are you seeing your team do the same with you now?

I do actually. And I think people like they will come to me with questions about different ways to use it, I think everybody is in their own place on their journey with it, but nobody is scared about it. Other than, you know, when you talk to like, there are people who are very concerned about, is this going to take my job eventually? But generally they're not scared of at least opening up the application and asking questions.

Let's do that thought exercise. What jobs could actually be absorbed in marketing by AI? Cause I think there's a lot of change. Here's for instance, we do media buying and we do a lot of advertising and we've never built an in-house creative department.

We're using like invideo.ai to generate videos now. They're not as good as creative, they're not as good as an agency, but they also not cost 40 to $60,000 for a four minute video. I'm curious if you see other areas where there can be substantial cost savings to leverage AI and either have it replace or augment somebody. And I know that it's not supposed to sound toxic or dangerous. It's more like, do you actually see any roles that might phase out over time?

I see roles adapting more than I see them being phased out. Like it would be very difficult, I think for a lot of DMOs to say, okay, great, we are outsourcing our photography or our video production to AI, right? Like part of working at a destination is promoting the authenticity of, not only of your destination, but of your work to promote it. But there's different ways that we use video. So we do have an in-house creative team, we have a full agency with the exception of the media buy-in. And so, you know, we have a team that will put together beautiful videos that I wouldn't want to change a single thing about what they do, but we also put together videos that are really just animated pieces promoting programs like Broadway week and restaurant week. So, and they're quick 15 second, 30 second videos.
I'm sure that there are ways that AI can help speed up the process of creating these animated videos. And because I'm not a visual person, I don't know entirely what those ways would be.

Here's one area where I see it not working is you just mentioned Restaurant Week. That's a creation of New York City Tourism and Conventions, correct? So I don't see a world, at least not now, in which AI generates that type of idea. Are you seeing it different?
That could just be my lack of like of creative use of generative AI. Do you feel differently about that?

I think if you wanted to use AI to come up with an idea like Restaurant Week, it's about how do you use AI? So you could just go and say, Hey, we're hosting…the real birth story of Restaurant Week is that in 1992, we were hosting the Democratic National Convention, restaurant tours were freaked out that this was going to affect their summer sale and so the chairman of our board at the time, who was Tim Zagat, who's the creator of the Zagat guide. And so he's very, very tuned in to the restaurant scene. It's like, great, let's do, you know, just a prefix meal. It's $19,92 cents lunch only. And focusing on white table cloth restaurants in Manhattan. And it was a huge hit.

$19 for a...

Yeah. And so we've done it ever since.

And clearly it's an idea that's been emulated all around the globe. There's multiple restaurant weeks, even here in the five boroughs, there's Harlem restaurant week and French restaurant week. So the very successful concept. If you sat down with chat GPT and said, I am concerned about the democratic national convention coming to New York city and ruining all of the business for our restaurants. Like maybe there's a chance it would come up. Like today…

I don't know. It depends. Is that story today? Is that story widely published on the internet right now?

Mm hmm.

Okay. Then it definitely would come up with that.

Exactly. But even, you know, and restaurant week as a concept now exists. So if I were going to rewind time to 1992 and let's say we had chat GPT then. I think the way that you get at those ideas is to treat the AI like it is a McKinsey consultant.
So you don't just say, like I had this conversation with a friend who works on Broadway probably a year ago where he said, I don't know, Janette, I sat down and I'm like, Broadway needs help resurrecting its suburban audiences. I asked for ideas and I wasn't impressed with anything I got back. And I'm like, you have to start, but what the hell does it know about Broadway and the business of Broadway? Like probably nothing. So you want to start just like you have that team of McKinsey consultants come in and say, great, you are a McKinsey consultant and I have a major problem that I want to solve. It is how do I help my restaurants while the DNC is in town? And here is all of the background on that problem. What other data points do you need from me in order to solve this issue as though you were a McKinsey consultant? And I think if you, provided it with the right kinds of and amounts of data that you're going to get closer to using it in a way that you find solutions. And will it be perfect today or even any good today? That's a crap shoot. But a year from now, that's the direction these things are going in.

Yeah. So it's used as a thought partner. The fortunate part about it is it's $20 a month for a ChatGPT instead of $600 an hour for a McKinsey consultant. So...

Or a million dollars for a McKinsey case study. For a two day engagement.

Yeah. But the beauty in it is that if you have the time, and that's the thing. So you need that like executive leadership is quick decision making, coaching people, enriching people, and contributing to the vision and mission. And it's funny because you can sit there yourself and just work with it and have that conversation. But really your job becomes inspiring your team to do that because it increases your leverage that still is time consuming. Can't just think for you.
You mentioned earlier that you just include and create more visibility. Like how frequently are you meeting internally about the things that you're learning?

We have a small group that meets monthly just about to talk through different pitches that we're receiving and opportunities that we have.
And then we have a Slack channel for everybody in the company who's interested in learning more about chat GPT. And so whenever somebody has a particularly good nugget, we throw it over there.

Can you reference or think of anything that's come up from somebody other than yourself in the past month or two, that's been really interesting and interesting use of AI?

Oh, Rastana Wardak, who is in our convention development team is probably the person at the company who's like really pushing the boundaries of what the tool can do. And so she does it for uses it for a lot of sales reports. And I didn't know this. If you are working with Excel in chat GPT, it can create new tabs in your workbook and then send it back to you. I'm like, yeah. And if you are putting together like, okay, I need this information about you know, my sales territory and the work I've done, but I need to have it broken out by month, or I need it broken out by sector.
Then you'll have a tab on your tech market and a tab on your, you know, government market.

It's brilliant cause the other big use that I've been seeing is we've hired what, like 10 people in the past six months and about 80% of the job applications you can tell that the cover letter is written with chat GPT. So I'm curious, how do you get around that? How do you get around the standardized language? The language bias of having it trained and then modified in, you know, a non-US, non-native English speaking country, which is how Chat GPT, I believe was trained. How do you get around some of the key words, like in the ¨fast paced world of¨ or a ¨rich tapestry¨. We can tell them to do rich tapestry which is something that's very frequent in my vocabulary. I use that every three or six sentences.

So it's very rare that we are using some kind of written output from chat GPT in any kind of final form. And I think we're very lucky as a DMO we have as part of our full in-house creative team, we have in-house writers. We have an in-house copy editor. So it's lazy writing, no matter who generates it just will never fly in New York city.

Yeah.

And I think there's an interesting kind of like ancillary point to what you brought up, which is the idea that there's all kinds of writing that we assign value to because it takes time to do. And so, and I'm trying to remember where I read a LinkedIn post about this a couple of months ago, that it's probably was Ethan Molyck actually, who if you don't follow him, he's at Wharton, he's terrific. And so he said, there are things that we do, performance reviews, letters of recommendation if you're a college professor, cover letters, things that are very pro forma, but we assign value to them because, oh, I should accept the student into my graduate program because this very busy professor took two hours out of her day to write this beautiful letter to me. But now, every letter is, you know, fake beautiful at a minimum, so is there still value in doing that work or do we need to find a new way to evaluate people? Just like all resumes are becoming AI generated too, right?

Yeah, per job application.

Yes.

Like based on the application details, we go through 400 resumes for every one person that we hire generally. There's so much, it's so visible that things are getting more and more like the job description. Like there are apps that tailor it to the job description, which I find fascinating.

Going back a little bit to the marketing side, though, one of the questions I just like to ask marketers, whether it's in the age of AI or any other period in your career, what's like an exceptional marketing campaign that you've been involved with, something that just knocked it out of the park, exceeded your expectations is something you're really proud of and you'd like to share with our audience.

I'm so proud of the work around the campaign that was our big campaign to bring tourism back to New York City after the pandemic.
It was called it's time for New York City. And so typically we refresh our campaign once a year and so every September we will launch a new campaign and then that's what we use around the globe to promote New York City. So coming out of the pandemic, we were lucky to get a $30 million one-time cash infusion from the city from federal fund aid.

That's nice. I'll take that.

We don't, we don't always get to play with budgets like that. So to be able to take the time to say, great, we're going to really ideate what we want the campaign to be. We're going to have the proper time to be able to do testing of that particular line. So online focus groups, both with, you know, residents of the city to make sure that it was ringing true to them. And then, you know, across the US to be able to do a little bit of survey testing with some of our key international markets, just to make sure that we weren't pushing too hard or too early, that it was time for New York City and time to come back and time to celebrate. Our idea was that it wasn't just what the city was in your mind from 2019, but acknowledging that not everything was necessarily accessible at the time that we were advertising.
So the campaign launched in the summer of 2021, and Broadway didn't really reopen until that fall.

That wasn't one of those first shows. That was an interesting experience. So I saw Moulin Rouge the week before Broadway closed, and then like two weeks after it reopened. And it was, I mean, it was sitting in the room with masks and everything, but there were tears. There were absolute tears. I'm getting chills just thinking about it. You have, Broadway is such a special, special place and being in an audience, like that was the first time I realized like the world is recovering when I was sitting in that show. Oh no, it wasn't Moulin Rouge on the way back. It was Hadestown with... oh no. With... Hadestown. With what's his name?

Oh my God. With Andre Deshields.

Andre Deshields. Amazing. And you could... And then they, at the end, the Ukraine thing had just started and it was like, I remember them putting the cups up in the air. I was bawling at the end of that show.

That show was so beautiful. It's designed just, yeah, to cry like that.

That is the most amazing show. Real quick, like tell me, what was your role? Was the Broadway work you were doing, was that when you were agency side or was that when you were in-house?

So my entire career prior to moving to the DMO side was Broadway. So I started off at Broadway.com and it was actually pre-Broadway.com. So it was a…

Oh, it was post-acquisition?

Yeah, so it was called Theater Direct when I started working there in 98 and it sold Broadway tickets to the travel industry. So like my markets for it, group sales are really important to Broadway. So it's a lot of group and student ticket sales, but then also I was developing the Asia Pacific market. So Japan was the up and coming market at the time that I was doing this work. That's how I learned the travel industry very early on. So I ended up staying there for eight years then I went in-house for a Broadway general manager where I priced tickets Les Mis and A Chorus Line and Phantom of the Opera. And so I was developing sales channels.

When that was like a manual process, right?

It was absolutely a manual process. I'd work with the box office treasurer directly on, okay, well, maybe holiday week tickets should cost more than mid September tickets.

Yeah. I'm traveling to Paris next week and there's definitely dynamic pricing involved near the Olympics. I can tell that that's for darn sure. We're good before the Olympics and I was like, thank God I have Marriott points because I'm not spending $1,500 a night on a hotel.

Yeah. So I was the General Manager for four years, and then I helped to open the US office of an agency called AKA. And so, and they did advertising for Broadway shows and then attractions as well in city, and so I was the head of the insights team there.

I got you. But Broadway sounds like a really incredible segment of the market to be advertising in because it's so experiential.
It's so manual. Like it's small distribution for a large amount of effort, because it's smallish theaters generally. But it's the most like incredible form of entertainment that exists and I feel like that's like an easy thing to say and for people to agree with.

Yeah, and it's hard because Broadway is measured week by week. So your lease in the theater, it's a weekly lease, all bills are paid weekly.

What?

And if you fall below what is called your stop clause, two weeks in a row, your theater owner has the right to evict you.

Uh, so Phantom did it for 50 years.

Yeah. Phantom fell below their stop clause and at a certain point, the Schubert organization, which owned the majestic theater, they weren't looking to push Phantom out at any point because you know, it's Phantom.

Yeah, it finally happened after a six month extension.

Yeah.

That was a great show. So we talked about a campaign that went really well. We're having too much fun. What didn't go well? Like what was a miserable failure that you're ashamed of, you've kicked out of your head, and we're going to bring it back from its grave today and in front of the entire world.

Oh, so this wasn't a miserable failure, but it makes me sad it didn't work more. So I worked on the Broadway production of Matilda.

And as you can imagine, it was incredibly upsetting to us as an agency that we didn't win the Tony award and I don't remember what year it was 2014, so Matilda lost to Kinky Boots. And this was the show that was going to put the agency, like really legitimize it and put it on the map and so to lose what we kind of embarrassingly thought was a lot. Like that was hard, but then the show…you know Tony Award sell tickets, so we were in year two of Matilda and not selling the tickets that the show wanted to be able to sell. Like it just, the demand wasn't there and so somebody connected to the show did this whole big market research thing where they got 19,000 responses to a survey on tickets to Matilda. And then they gave us a word cloud and said, all right, well, here's your insights and like, I think we can do better than that. Would you mind sharing the raw data?
And I dug in there and we spent a slow December kind of looking at the information and we realized people who haven't seen Matilda yet but wanted to, it's because they're older and they're waiting for a young family member to visit before they buy the team. So we needed, so the insight was we need to give permission to these grandparents to not wait for their grandkids to visit before they see the show.
And so we gave that brief to the creative team and they came back with the most beautiful commercial concept. And it was called when I grow up, and so you can find that on YouTube if you're interested.
Shot this beautiful commercial in Los Angeles with just, you know, actors kind of hearing the song from Matilda that's called when I grow up and just kind of digging into that childlike joy that they had shed off a little bit and it was gorgeous.

And it did not really move the needle on the show. Like the show had a very respectable run. Like we're proud of the work we did on it, but we were really hoping that that TV commercial would have turned the show's fortunes around and honestly, it's possible that it just costs too much money to make, and we didn't save enough money to promote the commercial and I think marketers can fall victim to that a lot.

You'll especially creative marketers. You live and you learn, right? Like it's people who want to tell a story and who are good at telling a story. You kind of need the media budget.

You need the media budget. And without that you wasted your time and that's a hard lesson.

And there wasn't a $30 million cash infusion for that one.
All right. So last topic. What is on the horizon that you're excited about right now?

I'm just excited about digging more into AI learning.

You're such a nerd.

I am a student. I am studying right now to take the AIGP exam from IAPP. So if you're familiar with the International Association of Privacy Professionals offers a number of certifications and one of them is a certification in AI data governance. And so it's just around, you know, knowing that we don't really know what happens in the black box of AI, but how can we still be accountable for the information that we put into those systems? So making sure that, you know, you don't have an intern at your company who signs up, you know, for not for chat GPT, not something through open AI, but some GPT wrapper product that has no terms and conditions yet and then they upload your business plan into it because they will promise some free goodie if they did so.
Like, there's nothing stopping your junior level talent from doing that today because most of us don't really have any rules in place around it. So you don't know that it's wrong. So how do you put those guidances in place so that you're not uploading things you shouldn't into platforms that you're providing platforms that are more available for your staff to use more freely. So looking at, you know, platforms like Chat GPT team or enterprise that have SOC 2 level compliance. And then understanding the outputs, what are the ways that those outputs can and cannot be used, particularly as the, you know, EU AI Act goes into effect. Like that has implications on marketers everywhere, like it has implications for New York City because, you know, we're working in Europe. So even though we're not based in Europe, travelers are coming to us from those destinations. So how are we planning for that?

The good thing about all the regulation in Europe, specifically on the Google side, is it still makes it so you can do SEO. It still works there. That was a bit tongue in cheek. It still works in the US, but it's like the term flights in the US, if you search flights on Google in the US, six of the results are Google flights.

Yeah.

If you did it in Europe, that's not really allowed because the gatekeepers act.

Oh, that's interesting.

So, yeah, it's a weird one, but you know, because their regulations are much more firm there. They're less lobbying. I think that's not my area of expertise.
I think this was a wonderful, really diverse conversation. Hopefully this was helpful to marketers in different positions, both in senior leadership like yourself and one's up and coming curious. Where are you traveling next?

Destinations International. So Tampa.

Okay. Have fun.

Yeah.

That's a fun one. Very cool. Well, thanks so much for joining me today, Jen. I appreciate it.

Great. Thank you, Brennen.

For more empowering ideas, visit Propellic.com. We're on a mission to create more diversity and thought for the planet, and dedicated to helping brands both large and small increase their reach through intelligent travel, transportation, and tourism marketing. P-R-O-P-E-L-L-I-C.COM