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You’re a marketer in one of the most competitive industries.
You may be tired of trying, over and over, to use the same marketing strategies that you read about online or learned about in school - but is that really going to move the needle?
We all know the big brands - Booking.com, American Airlines, The Points Guy, Royal Caribbean, Marriott, VRBO, and Hertz... but what about the emerging brands that have found their path to scale?
The Travel Marketing Podcast is about sitting down with successful marketing professionals in the travel, transportation, and tourism industry to learn what has worked for them, what they’ve learned along the way, and what new trends they’re noticing.
We are Propellic, and we’re on a mission to create more diversity in thought for the planet. We’re doing that by helping brands - specifically travel, transportation, and tourism brands - increase their reach through intelligent marketing that travels further.
This is the travel marketing podcast brought to you by Propellac, bringing you the news and insights and what's working and not working working in today's competitive transportation and tourism landscape. From emerging brands to the most established professionals, these lessons of intelligent marketing will help your marketing plan travel further.
Brennen Bliss:I'm really excited to dive in. The tourism campaigns are something that I find to be incredibly exciting and impressive, especially getting back from ITB being around all of those countries. Now I did some research and the inspired by Iceland campaign that we're talking about today that I'm excited to dive into. And thank you again, by the way, for joining me. I looked back and I was just looking at some performance reports, and I saw that there was actually an inspired by Iceland campaign in 2010 after the volcanic eruption that helped influence visitor sentiment with a much smaller budget than your current campaign, which appeared to have been COVID exit plan.
Brennen Bliss:So out of curiosity, before we dive in, why is the name the same for the campaign in 2020 and 2010?
Sveinn Birkin:Well, the initial campaign in 2010, that was supposed to be a 3 month campaign to begin with. And that was the first time that companies and official parties of the government of Iceland, for example, came together to fund a project like this. And everybody was so happy with the results of the initial campaign that they decided to keep on funding it. So the campaign per se sort of transitioned into more of a brand. So the inspired by Iceland came sort of the brand for or the tourism sector, And we just kept on and have sort of kept to that name ever since.
Sveinn Birkin:Sort of a more like a brand identity rather than a campaign per se.
Brennen Bliss:And you've been involved for most, if not all that time. Right?
Sveinn Birkin:Since 2011.
Brennen Bliss:Yeah. So you joined right when that was starting. Wow. I'm excited to dig in. This is a unique episode for us because typically we interview private companies.
Brennen Bliss:Alright. This is obviously a more public initiative, government funding. I think it's business. Iceland is the name of the overseeing body that you're involved with.
Brennen Bliss:So let's just enter 2020. Like, so this is kind of what we consider an evergreen campaign, and then there's a pandemic. Right? Tourism drops off the map for everybody. What was the planning process?
Brennen Bliss:How did it come about in 2020 that we're gonna make this investment again? And how do you decide on the messages and the mediums that you use to get the word out?
Sveinn Birkin:Okay. So, the campaign had been running more or less consecutively from the year 2011 as a campaign every year until 2 1019 or 2020. That's at the time, we had more or less the funding for the project that we had been working on or funding for the project that we had been working under, which we called yeah. Doesn't really matter. I guess it's in Icelandic anyway.
Sveinn Birkin:But so the funding for the original project had sort of run its course, and we were in dialogue with the government on whether we should continue funding tourism marketing or not. That's when COVID hit, and it became very apparent that, you know, it was going to affect tourism tremendously. Our initial thought process was, is it going to take maybe you know, this would be a disruption for tourism for the next 3 months probably. So we assume that 3 months, we would face drastic reduction in tourism numbers for 3 months and then hopefully return to normal. So we wanted to sort of address that situation in the sort of spring of 2020, and the government decided to fund the campaign to save the summer of 2020.
Sveinn Birkin:Obviously, things turned out a bit different.
Brennen Bliss:Just a little bit. Just a little bit.
Sveinn Birkin:It turned into more like 3 years rather than 3 months. It sort of goes to show how much we knew going into this.
Brennen Bliss:It's fascinating. I mean, everything from the visual identity to the concept of it, clearly there was a lot of work put into it, and you've been involved this entire time. What are some of like the key messages that you communicate through the campaign?
Sveinn Birkin:Like I said, when we first started in the spring of 2020, and we wanted to hit on a note that would sort of show some empathy and because, you know, at the time, everybody was really, really frustrated. We had been cooped up at home without being able to meet people or go out for a trip with friends or anything. So for 3 months, everybody was just more or less locked at home, and we wanted to do something different than just say, oh, we are gonna be here. You join us when all of this is over. You know, we wanted to send some sort of a message that showed that we were in the same position and feel some sort of an understanding of what people were going through.
Sveinn Birkin:So the initial campaign that we came up with or the initial activation came up with with our partners was the looks like you need to let it out campaign, which we formally called the screaming campaign. And so the idea behind that campaign was that we would set up loud speakers around the country and created an, would allow you to record your screams of frustration to be let out in Icelandic nature. Iceland has, like, vast open spaces and, you know, there's room and a lot of room to let out your primal screams, so to speak. So we just wanted to give people an opportunity to really let out their frustrations, mental frustrations through screaming and Icelandic nature. Sort of a problem.
Brennen Bliss:So out of curiosity, what did the adoption of this look like?
Sveinn Birkin:Adoption in what terms?
Brennen Bliss:Was this a very heavily used feature?
Sveinn Birkin:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The admission campaign was a great success. I think we recorded over 20,000 screams during the 2 months that we were running it.
Sveinn Birkin:And also, you know, people were screaming all sorts of of Yeah. Frustrations, like, you can imagine, but we would, yeah, we would allow people to scream and sort of let it out.
Brennen Bliss:Got it.
Sveinn Birkin:And I think that initial activation sort of sets the tone for the rest of the campaign. So when we sort of saw how much that tone of empathy or participation, how much that resonated with people, then that was sort of the tone that we want to keep moving forward. Yeah. But since then, I've always sort of been built around an idea of us being a solution of some sort.
Brennen Bliss:Oh, as a destination. Right. One of the things that's just chronically difficult to track is the effectiveness of a tourism marketing campaign at a national scale. Right? Because what we're trying to drive is economic prosperity through people staying at hotels and the way that we get paid is generally through something like an occupancy tax or whatever it may be.
Brennen Bliss:So just like getting extremely high level and understanding, I'm just looking at at the facts and saying you had budget through middle of 2023, and then it got extended to the end of 2020 3 based on what I'm reading here, which means you had success. There was success. So I'm curious what KPIs or what performance indicators did you set on the outset that you wanted to achieve that you saw yourself hit or miss?
Sveinn Birkin:So this was a very unique situation for us because as you said, it's very difficult to track these campaigns. But for the first time since well, I think I can always say for the first time in recorded history, we're in the unique position that we were the only entity of any source that was speaking to the markets. At any given time, you'll have Icelandair, Play Airlines, Blue Lagoon. A lot of stakeholders in the Icelandic tourist market, they are marketing as well.
Brennen Bliss:Mhmm.
Sveinn Birkin:This was the only time that we had 100% share of voice for brand Iceland.
Brennen Bliss:Interesting.
Sveinn Birkin:Once you had lockdown or this closing and people stopped traveling, then everybody more or less held back for the 1st 2 months.
Brennen Bliss:Sure.
Sveinn Birkin:And we were the only entity that was really marketing. So for the first time, we could track what was happening related to our campaigns. So we could get feedback from companies how much increase there was in website visits, searches, and so on, and we were the only entity that was doing any marketing. So we could trace that back to the campaign for the very first time. We could sort of isolate our activities from everybody else's.
Sveinn Birkin:Mhmm. And that's Yeah,
Brennen Bliss:it's interesting. I I would imagine if you look at something like Google Trends over the past 5 years and track performance, you can see the growth. Yeah. Through interesting. I've never heard that insight before.
Brennen Bliss:Because generally, there are a lot of commercial investments in destinations. Right? If you have Disney World here in Orlando, Florida, it's not just Orlando, Florida that's advertising Disney World. It's Disney World that's advertising Orlando, Florida. Right?
Sveinn Birkin:A lot of resellers probably as well.
Brennen Bliss:Yeah. For sure. And then I mean, but you find yourself in a vacuum there where really you get to measure your impact. What do you have? I mean, I know there's awards.
Brennen Bliss:I know there's 1100 media features. But is there anything that you can point to from an economic standpoint? Is there economic impact study that's been done or something that you can look at and say we did this?
Sveinn Birkin:If you give me a moment to expand on this a little further, I think we'll get there, but answer is yes and no. So what we saw there for the first campaign, for the let it out campaign, when we were sort of in a vacuum, speaking into the void, or screaming into the void, if you will, there was no one else was doing anything, and we could sort of see through our partners through website what was happening. And I think we saw, for example, that Icelandair was seeing 15% increase in searches during the during this time. I'm not gonna promise you that it's a correct number, but around about there. As we started moving on, we kept marketing, and we were doing marketing throughout the old code era.
Sveinn Birkin:And the most destinations sort of reduced their marketing during COVID. What we saw however that you know obviously we had a tiny destination, so the this gave us a, you know, a very good opportunity to sort of increase our share of voice in the destination marketing field. But it also so we were continuously talking to people and reminding them that they wanted to come to Iceland once they were able to travel again. So what we saw is that Iceland rose from, well, not being present in something like the UGOV destination index and not measuring in the top 10, moving into the 5th most desirable destination in the US, and I think 7th in the UK. We also saw that there was a lot of built up demand for Iceland once people could travel again, and Iceland was the fastest, rebounded the fastest, bigger destinations, especially in Western Europe.
Sveinn Birkin:You could see that Iceland was in 2023, Iceland was up to 95%, I think, of of of the 2019 tourism numbers. And was the
Brennen Bliss:In 2023. Wow.
Sveinn Birkin:Yeah. That's yeah.
Brennen Bliss:That is much faster.
Sveinn Birkin:We repolled much faster than the destinations that we compare ourselves to. We've seen a much faster return numbers, and I think 2022 was very close to being comparable to 2019 numbers. In 2023, we actually surpassed the 2019 numbers.
Brennen Bliss:Got it. And when you look at budget allocation getting a little bit further into the weeds and where you see effective marketing investment, I guess, walk me through the channels that you used. Obviously, social media, for instance, and search. So where do you put your time, energy, and money for this campaign? One thing I do wanna say is outstanding is the visual representation.
Brennen Bliss:All of the user experience, the visual interface, everything that you've built around the campaign digitally is gorgeous. But when you look at channel investment, whether it be SEO, SEM, social media influencers, where did that how was that?
Sveinn Birkin:Yeah. Most of the spending is as a tiny destination, we are very well aware of that. We can't really compete in MediaBuy. Mhmm. But just sort of fraction of what most of the destinations that we're competing with are have to play with, and and we can't be outbidding Norway, for example, for in SEM, for example.
Sveinn Birkin:Our strategy is is much more based on creating value through PR. What we try to invest in is ideas. Come up with an idea that is going to have a breakthrough effect in media, and people are going to cover it. That's how we try to extend the if you will, by recruiting others to share the story for us. So we try to come up with an idea that is going to be something that is going to be talked about.
Sveinn Birkin:We try to create something that's thought worthy and has an built in shareability and a built in create an interest for the media. That's why we do campaigns, something like the Icelandverse, which was a play on the metaverse, the outsource email, a campaign where you get horses to to write out of office supplies for you and so on. So we do stuff that's going to be a little strange and going to get people to talk about the campaign. Share it and the media to to cover it because we can't be competing. We can compete in the field of ideas, but we can't compete in the field of media.
Brennen Bliss:Well, it's it really sounds like the more provocative ideas, the things that are more unique are the things that worked well for you. And I can imagine that led very distinctly to the PR mentions and visibility because that's what gets PR is the unique, the different. Right? Someone spending $10,000,000 on paid media is not gonna get a PR feature. That's just somebody using brute force to get in to the auction.
Brennen Bliss:So talking about PR, what was your PR strategy? Did you pitch publications? Did you kind of announce something and got traction naturally? How did you go about that?
Sveinn Birkin:It's a little different based on a little different from one campaign to the next. Some of these we worked with, you know, peer partners that have sort of helped us with the settling of the story to begin with. Some of them sort of take off naturally. There's something like the Icelanders campaign that sort of just took off, didn't really need much of a push, while others, sometimes you need to sort of introduce the idea beforehand. But, yeah, it's a little different from one campaign to the next.
Brennen Bliss:Was there anything so the PR channel clearly worked quite well for y'all. Were there any channels or any strategies that you attempted that really missed the mark and you just flat out failed?
Sveinn Birkin:I wouldn't say that that there were channels that didn't work. There were ideas that didn't work as well as other ideas. We did one campaign which wasn't really didn't really have the built in PR ability or talk within us of some of the other campaigns, and we knew that going into it, but sort of hoped that it would gain some social traction, but it never really did. Yeah. I think it's more ideas that didn't work rather than channels that didn't work.
Brennen Bliss:Interesting. Yeah. Because you you clearly went into this with a philosophy around channels. You went into this and said, let's go on the PR angle because we can't compete in search engines. We can't compete with paid media buying necessarily on socials.
Brennen Bliss:When you look back at the campaign as a whole, probably, you know, a 1000 people subscribe to this somewhere in there. I'm not quite sure. I I don't remember exactly what the listener statistics were. When you look back though and think about what worked and what didn't, what advice would you give to a destination marketer to create an impactful campaign with a limited budget?
Sveinn Birkin:Yeah. I think for us, what we had I think one of the key ingredients for us that we had a lot of trust with our creative partners. So we were working with an agency here in Iceland called Peel and another agency in New York called SS and K. From the first meeting, we just had a really good vibe, I guess. We had a lot of trust in each other, and they trusted us to really give them feedback on ideas, and we trusted them to come up with ideas that would be a little out there.
Sveinn Birkin:And I think just having the courage to do something different. Yeah. A lot of the time people will talk to us about how why we are doing so, or how we get an idea for a TMO. There's often a lot of governmental oversight or political influences that people sometimes ask us just how to get an idea, a strange idea through the whole Yeah. Agreement process.
Sveinn Birkin:And I think that's one of the key reasons that we've done so many campaigns in the past that have worked out for us or worked well. People sort of trust us to the stakeholders and the infrastructure, if you will. We have the trust of the people in the industry
Brennen Bliss:Sure.
Sveinn Birkin:To make decisions. But and also it's a, you know, it's a fairly small community. Everybody knows each other more or less. So it's the the process of getting stuff through isn't all that difficult. But I think if I were to give somebody advice, I would say just have the courage to do something different.
Sveinn Birkin:A lot of times people are, you know, trying to out every other destination. Yeah. That doesn't always work. I mean, there's a lot of competition for those kind of ads.
Brennen Bliss:I think you can buy media anywhere and everywhere. It's what the offer you can't just put a picture of a mountain in and say, come here. You have to have something. Right? If you were to start from scratch, is there anything you would have done differently?
Brennen Bliss:You know, looking back 10, 12, 13 years now from when you started. Yeah. That was a very easy question.
Sveinn Birkin:A lot of people you should do differently once you start really start thinking about it. I think we've been very lucky in that we've we've been able to sort of reflect authenticity, I think. We like to do things a little different, like I said, but that's sort of Icelandic way of approaching things as well, doing things a little differently. So I think we've been lucky enough to sort of project an authentic image of Iceland even if it's a little different from many other campaigns, a little quirky perhaps. So I think it took us a while to get there and really lean into it, but I think that's what's worked out the best for us.
Sveinn Birkin:And like I talked a little bit about how we wanted to build campaigns around empathy during COVID. It's that human element that's really worked for us very well. So I think leaning more into that, leaning into the earlier, that could probably have been been a wise decision. Mhmm. But in general
Brennen Bliss:And then the other pieces we learned that COVID lasted longer than 3 months. Right? Yeah.
Sveinn Birkin:It's, it's, we have an Icelandic saying. It's easy to be wise after the fact.
Brennen Bliss:Yeah. Well, I appreciate it very much. This was a unique and fun learning opportunity I think for our listeners. I'm curious. One of the questions I like to ask everybody that we interview on this podcast every other week is where are you traveling next yourself?
Sveinn Birkin:Where am I traveling? I'm actually going to Oslo tomorrow. But I, you know, that's all business. So but I guess I would really like to travel in Iceland this summer.
Brennen Bliss:I'm currently planning an Iceland trip actually for for July this year.
Sveinn Birkin:Okay.
Brennen Bliss:Yeah. So I'm excited to check it out for the first time. I got somewhat near there by accident, not actually, but I did go up into the Nordic countries by accident 3 days ago when I set my alarm for 4:20 PM instead of 4:20 AM, missed my flight to London from Berlin from ITV. Oh, that's cool. Had to fly to Copenhagen and then to Berlin.
Brennen Bliss:I mean, Copenhagen, then to London, and then to Dallas, and then to Austin rather than direct to Austin, which was a nightmare. But I got a little bit closer to Iceland, and I'm very excited to see it in the summer.
Sveinn Birkin:Are you in Austin?
Brennen Bliss:I am in Austin.
Sveinn Birkin:Okay. So we have a team out there now for South by Southwest.
Brennen Bliss:Wonderful. Oh, look at that. Maybe we'll we'll take it offline for a second and chat about that. Thank you so much for coming on with me today.
Sveinn Birkin:Yeah. My pleasure.
Propellic:For more empowering ideas, visit propelic.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. Propellic.com.