“One of the great things about partnering with R&R has been their knowledge around the travel destination journey,” Mellman said. With a better understanding of their customer’s journey, the brand is creating customized creative for each journey stage. Since Brand USA wants to reach a global audience, it’s worked with R&R to narrow its focus down to five target customer personas.
Brand USA’s funding comes from state tourism offices and travel brands, plus matching funds from ESTA fees paid by Visa Waiver Program travelers.
Worldwide Partners was an attractive option because of its hospitality expertise, and particularly its prior experience with “appropriate stewardship of public funds and public-private partnerships,” Mellman told Adweek. The CMO was searching for a partner that was both agile and scalable, and told Adweek an independent agency network wound up being ideal.
“We really wanted to build an integrated agency team model that had really great expertise, brought to the table by all of those agency partners,” she said.
The ‘reverse holding company’ model
The agencies within Harris’ network are never competing for business, nor faced with external pressures like stock performance. “We’re set up as a reverse holding company,” Harris told Adweek. The major holding companies are listed on stock exchanges, making them accountable to shareholders, and historically stoking competition between sister agencies invested in a bottom line.
“Our agencies have all opted in to say ‘We want to be a part of this,’ and leverage a group of peers who share similar values, an entrepreneurial spirit and who have one agenda, which is [that] we’re going to deliver for clients,” Harris said.
R&R’s network relationships—particularly with agency partners abroad—were crucial to winning the business. Brand USA wanted global reach, but valued working with agency partners embedded in specific geographies. The service model lets Brand USA tap into Worldwide Partners’ subsidiary agencies and their hyper-local knowledge. It increased chances that audiences receive nuanced messaging despite the language and cultural barriers that often stoke misunderstandings and can cause international campaigns to fall flat.
Getting started
“We felt coming out of the pandemic that there was a pent up demand for travel … That there was a need to really double down,” said R&R president Fletcher Whitwell. That possibility excited the R&R team that pitched the account. During the pitch, the agency focused on developing a plan that it could execute fast. “We put forward a plan as if they could take it to market the next week, and I think that they appreciated us really putting our experience to bear for them,” Whitwell added.
In April, the partners kicked off a major campaign called “This Is Where It’s At.” By May 31, that campaign generated almost 2 billion impressions and 317 million completed views for Brand USA. The video campaign’s cost per completed view is besting goals by 400%, R&R told Adweek.
