The One Tourism Insight That Created One Thousand Great Ideas

Building the Complete Campaign

The 18 Summers campaign centers around a VisitIdaho.org landing page that conveys one clear message: Summer isn’t the only thing that goes by fast. Make every one count.

Along with online, broadcast and radio media buys, this complete campaign provides family travelers with inspirational vacation ideas, travel tips, itineraries and videos showing what an Idaho vacation is all about. The final takeaway is that Idaho is the premier place for families to get more “we” time — where they can make the most of their 18 Summers together.

The Situation

Americans leave hundreds of millions of unused vacation days on the table and are missing out on opportunities to make memories with their children and families. Per US Travel’s Project Time Off Initiative:

• 53% of kids surveyed strongly agree that vacations bring their family closer together.
• 62% of adults said they remember childhood trips more clearly than school events or birthdays—and over half of the children said vacations bring their family closer together.

The Message

Take the time you’ve earned to connect with your children. You only have 18 Summers together while they are still kids and time goes by too fast. 

Coupled with very limited national awareness and being outspent 8:1, Idaho suffers from a significant lack of share-of-voice among western states to potential travelers. This means that we have to deliver the right message, to the right people, at the right time.

The Design

The 18 Summers landing page at https://visitidaho.org/18summers features a responsive web design that adapts to the user’s behavior, viewing environment, screen size being used, and device orientation.

To create an optimized and seamless user experience, our digital team crafted flexible grids, images, and layouts, then implemented inventive uses of CSS media queries, enabling users to switch between their laptop, phone, or tablet. Making trip planning easy for busy moms on the move.

The Content

Travel Tips

From day one of the 18 Summers campaign, we’ve worked to have spectacular content offerings on the site through Travel Tips, itineraries, first-hand narratives, and more. Since launch, we’ve continued to cultivate family-friendly content that resonates with parents and is responsive to the search queries that we see on the site.

We now have an ever growing list of highly-valuable Travel Tips available to families, and each day this content grows. With an eye on analytics, we’ve been able to create ongoing content that consistently engages our target audience.

Things To Do

Parents can quickly find their perfect adventure by filtering between a variety of factors including season, budget, activity level, region, and more. Each adventure showcases important planning elements such as photos of the area, maps and directions, descriptions, fees, weather, links and resources, and a variety of other relevant information. The adventure library continues to grow and there are currently over 945 adventures available.

Social Media, Photography & Video

Parents who want daily Travel Tips, inspiration and unique Idaho features are able to follow Visit Idaho on social media and receive daily content tailored to parents with kids between the ages of 5 and 17.

The video portion of the 18 Summers site includes a four-part ‘docu-memory’ series capturing real families adventuring across Idaho, one memory at a time. The feature video features a showcase of every region of the state, and visually reflects the featured Travel Tips and photography from some of Idaho’s most epic landscapes.

Each video highlights a different part of the state, activities to enjoy and family interviews. Video was leveraged to produce online ads for the campaign. This includes :06 second bumpers, :15 second teasers, :30 second trailers and lastly, a 3-minute hero film.

The Backpack

Families can also use the new Backpack feature, which allows users to add adventures, lodging, and Travel Tips to their Backpack to save and share with their family and friends. The Backpack comes with a user login system, automated email notifications, the ability to share from a private URL, and a responsive design making it available on desktop and mobile.

From long nights of web development to strenuous months of video and photography production on the road, we wouldn’t trade this line of work for anything in the world.

Safe travels.