Travel + Tourism

Come play

Inspiring families to reconnect with their inner child

Challenge

The ultimate play destination.

The Strong National Museum of Play is a wonderful place for kids of all ages, featuring lots of hands-on play experiences for the kids, the National Toy Hall of Fame, and the World Video Game Hall of Fame. With a huge expansion underway and an out-of-state tourism grant from the state, they needed to draw more out-of-town tourism to the area.

Approach

The power of nostalgia.

Most major metros have a children's museum. Since The Strong is also a historical toy museum, we could leverage assets that other children’s museums don’t have—the toys—to differentiate ourselves from the competition. This insight led us to break the audience into two distinct targets—Moms in Charge and Kids at Heart. By tapping into the power of nostalgia, we could create an emotional connection to the audience unlike any other children’s museum.

Solution

Toystimonials.

We created a campaign featuring iconic toys exclaiming their excitement about a day at the museum. This gave us an engaging visual that immediately grabbed the attention of both kids and parents, as well as a device to present all the amazing experiences at the museum enthusiastically. Through a mix of local TV buys and retargeting online, the campaign targeted out-of-state metropolitan areas within driving distance to The Strong—Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Toronto—urging them to visit.

The sky's the limit.

To create added awareness in the Pittsburgh and Cleveland areas, we flew aerial banners (that’s right, aerial banners) to increase name recognition and site traffic. The nostalgic Pac Man banners led to lifts in site traffic of 3000-5000% on days they flew.

I don't want to grow up.

Additionally, to show the museum wasn’t just for kids, special posts and posters were created to draw grown-up guests to the World Video Game Hall of Fame and the National Toy Hall of Fame. By turning their nostalgia into works of art, guests could walk away with a reminder to visit.

Results

A toy story worth sharing.

The campaign created a lot of buzz, and we don’t mean Lightyear. It exceeded all expectations and benchmarks. Out-of-state visits to the website increased over 700% with intent to visit increasing by 20%. By the halfway point of the campaign we had 20.4M impressions — more than the goal of the entire campaign. We finished 200% over goal with a video completion rate 53-81% above benchmark.

700%
increase in out-of-state website visits
20%
increase in out-of-state intent to visit
67%
VCR above benchmark