Visit California customizes social campaign for Pinterest, Spotify, Snapchat and more

Brief:

California launched a social media campaign to boost tourism to the state, extending its "Born to Be Wild" effort that started late last year. Visit California, the state's tourism promotion agency, unveiled the digital experiences on Instagram, Snapchat, Spotify, Pinterest and TripAdvisor, per an announcement shared with Mobile Marketer.
The campaign's digital experiences vary by platform. For example, Visit California is the first destination marketing organization to use a global API integration on Pinterest with a quiz that helps to generate a California road trip inspiration board. Each custom board features dozens of pins tailored to the interests and type of road trip a user wants to experience.
In addition, the Spotify integration uses a quiz to generate a custom road trip playlist and Instagram Story polls ask users to make road trip-related decisions. The multichannel campaign started its rollout this month in the U.S., Canada, Mexico Australia and the U.K. Visit California worked with consumer action agency Mering on the campaign.

Insight:

Visit California's social media campaign aims to reach younger adults who tend to seek interesting and original travel experiences they can share on social media. The campaign is notable for customizing the experience by social media platform, demonstrating the key features and strengths of each. For example, the Pinterest inspiration board lines up well with how people use the platform to gather images of places they want to visit as part of their travel planning. Pinterest Trends, the company's online tool that shows top searches among its digital pinboards, listed travel ideas among its most popular themes last year.

The customization also is seen in the activation for Spotify, the audio streaming platform that has 153 million users of its ad-supported service by the end of last year. Spotify users can take a quiz to customize playlists for a road trip through California. The Spotify activation includes ads with 360-degree sound recordings to immerse listeners in the state's locations, per the announcement. The integration mirrors how users of the streaming platform make playlists, while also showcasing the ad capabilities of the platform.

By customizing each digital experience for the platform it appears on, Visit California has a better chance of engaging with users on each platform. A Snapchat Lens uses augmented reality (AR) to place users of the image-messaging app in a virtual vehicle with backdrops of the Pacific Ocean, Joshua Tree National Park and the redwoods forest. To reach the 1 billion people who use Instagram, Visit California is relying on Instagram Story Polls to ask users to choose how they want to spend a driving trip through the state. Its custom content hub on TripAdvisor shows road-trip itineraries that user can filter by personal preference, including theme and California region. Finally, a roulette game shows a quick road trip on Instagram and Snapchat.