How a DOOH campaign encouraged more to ‘Travel Texas’

Strategy - overall design & creative

For the ‘Let’s Texas’ DOOH campaign from April to September 2023, Travel Texas wanted to attract new visitors by exposing them to personalized OOH creative at locations in select markets that intersected with their daily lives. In this case, the strategy consisted of targeting, and retargeting, consumers in Albuquerque-Santa Fe, Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Kansas City, Little Rock-Pine Bluff, Los Angeles, Memphis, New Orleans, New York, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, San Francisco-Oak-San Jose and Washington, DC. To gain the most insight, Travel Texas used Vistar’s Device ID Passback (DIDP) solution to retarget consumer device IDs exposed to the DOOH campaign across other channels.

The DOOH advertisements were part of a larger campaign involving other media channels, including TV, audio, digital, social and print. While each channel supported the campaign’s goals, OOH demonstrated its unique ability to inform, entertain and attract a target audience in real-time.

The campaign ran across various indoor and outdoor DOOH venue types, including billboards, gas stations, apartment buildings, malls, urban panels and airports within these designated marketing areas (DMAs).

Between Travel Texas and Vistar Media, the teams placed a heightened focus on the campaign’s creative strategy. The campaign used a variety of static photos and videos to highlight Texas activities tied to day parting based on “daytime” and “nighttime” activities. With Vistar’s help, Texas Tourism targeted the creative to each specific DMA and elevated the approach to drive significant real-world results. To increase the relevance of the message, the campaign also leveraged different venues for each target audience – ensuring the message was being seen by the right people, at the right times and places.

This creative strategy ensured a hyper-relevant, hyper-local approach for Travel Texas that ultimately drove a stronger impact among consumers. This approach took advantage of the flexibility and advanced capabilities that programmatic DOOH offers, allowing Travel Texas to personalize its creative messages based on the mindset of the audience at the time of exposure, with no manual work required.

“By combining a contextually relevant strategy and data-driven technology into a successful DOOH campaign, we were able to take advantage of precise audience targeting and flexible, personalized creative that no other channel can match at scale,” said Heather Hager, Director of Media Services, Proof Advertising. “This approach helped us reach the desired audience and effectively drive lift in consumer visitors to the state of Texas.”

Results

The Travel Texas DOOH campaign focused on combining a creative strategy with smart audience targeting that ultimately drove people to visit the state of Texas, while also increasing consumers’ intent to vacation there. The campaign took advantage of DOOH’s ability to inspire real-world actions, in a measurable and meaningful way. By knowing where and when to target the desired audience and understanding which creative media, venue types, DMAs and audience demographics resulted in the best outcomes, Travel Texas was able to boost awareness, consideration, website visits and actual visitations to the great state.

To measure the success of the programmatic DOOH campaign, Vistar Media completed three measurement studies. First, they conducted a travel study with Arrivalist to evaluate the impact of the DOOH campaign on actual consumer travel behaviors. This involved using aggregated, privacy-compliant movement data to analyze the visitation patterns of people exposed to the campaign and determine the arrival lift as a result. Second, they conducted a brand study with MFour based on verified DOOH exposure to assess brand performance, focusing on awareness, consideration and intent to visit the state of Texas. Third, they ran an online conversion study with Reveal Mobile to compare consumers exposed to the campaign creative against unexposed consumers to evaluate any change in website visitation.

For the travel study, Vistar partnered with Arrivalist to gather data on arrivals based on DOOH campaign exposure. In doing so, Travel Texas was able to track the population exposed to the OOH creative compared to the control population that was not exposed to the campaign and, thus, was able to successfully measure the lift in visitations to the state of Texas. The data also provided insights into where the arrival population originated from, which destinations within the state they traveled to, the average time to arrival following exposure to the campaign, the most popular days of the week to travel and how far people traveled to visit Texas. Results and highlights, include:

• Most notably, consumers exposed to the campaign were 176% more likely to travel to Texas compared to a population sample with no exposure.
• Greater than 60% of users exposed to the creative visited Texas multiple times during the campaign, and nearly 60% of them arrived within 30 days of exposure.
• Of those exposed, greater than 35% came to Texas from distances of 250 to 499 miles – demonstrating that exposure directly influenced medium and very long-haul travel.

For the brand study, Vistar partnered with MFour to measure the lift in awareness, consideration and vacation intent. Based on the findings, the campaign successfully generated lift across all key metrics for Travel Texas, including a +2% lift in awareness (with 1 in 2 exposed consumers being aware of Texas as a vacation destination), a +22% lift in considering Texas as a vacation destination and an impressive +78% lift in intent to plan a trip to Texas.

Finally, for the online conversion study by Reveal Mobile, Vistar compared metrics from a 14-day pre-campaign conversion window, from March 31 to April 13, 2023, when the DOOH creative didn’t run to the DOOH campaign at these same locations during the post-campaign period, from April 14 to September 30, 2023.

As a result of Texas Tourism’s sophisticated audience targeting and creative strategies, the DOOH campaign was extremely successful at generating lift across all main KPIs, including driving a significant lift in visitors to Texas, as well as a positive lift in awareness, consideration, website visitation and intent to vacation in the state. These results highlight how OOH not only generates awareness but also drives lower-funnel metrics and significant real-world results.

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