HAVE SOME FUN IN THE PARK.
48,000 ACRES OF FUN.
VisitOP (the tourism division within the City of Overland Park) came to us in the Spring of 2021 and asked if we could help create awareness of Overland Park as a family destination, drive digital engagement and bring more tourists to the city. To complicate things, there was also a pandemic going on, there were Covid restrictions in place and people were still leery of travelling. But hey, we're always up for a challenge.
During our research phase, we discovered that Overland Park is the largest city in the United States with the word “park” in its name. So, even though it is a big city (and also a big suburb), it’s also technically the country’s “largest inhabited park.” We used this idea to create an integrated campaign built around the tagline “Overland Park. 48,000 acres of fun.”
We created this video to set up the whole “Overland Park is a large inhabited park slash big suburb slash city” because it never hurts to show a bunch of footage of people having fun. This is where the similarities to other tourism campaigns ended.
CONNECTED TV & BROADCAST
In all parks, you have “park rangers.” Our park ranger just happens to be self-appointed. We named him Ollie Prole, and produced 7 videos of him showing off some of peoples’ favorite places in Overland Park.
DISPLAY BANNERS
A surprising amount of travel booking is started through banner ads. And if you aren't Fiji (we're not), Europe (nope, not that either), or any other place that can immediately transport you into that heavily photoshopped paradise, you have to think a little differently.
Instead of the generalized beauty shots of a location, we followed the lead of National Park wayfinding signage. This let us tie the concept of Overland Park being a park to all the non-park-like vacation activities. Simple, unusual, and eye-catching for all of the wrong reasons. But most importantly, effective.
Overland Park
Ranger Badge Book
When you visit a park, you can earn badges. So Overland Park shouldn't be different. We partnered with Bandwango and a bunch of local businesses to create a loyalty program that incentivized visitors and OP residents to visit local businesses. Check into enough places, and you could earn prizes like stickers, posters or a camping mug from their favorite park-like-city.
So how'd it go? It went well. Surprisingly well.
Our videos ran on connected TV and were viewed almost 5 million times.
Engagement from these videos was twice what VisitOP had experienced in the past and performed above industry averages.
Hotel occupancy shot up from almost nothing during the heart of the pandemic to near capacity during the summer weekends.
And perhaps most impressive, there were over 100,000 visitors to the VisitOP website in July and Aug of 2021—far more than they had ever had before.
Overall social media engagement for campaign-related organic posts went up 8,000% over usual interaction levels, out performing any and all campaigns run in the history of VisitOP.
We thought 8,000% was a joke. We asked to double-check the numbers. It was wrong. It was 8,200%.
More work
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