• Greg Star, Co-Founder, Carvertise

Making Marketing Insights from Geolocation and Spending Data into Actionable Outcomes For Your Destination
Location: Main Salon F
Lake Charles will chare their award winning marketing campaign and provide an overview of how they used new data tools to successfullly open new markets and convert new travelers to the area.

• Josh Collins, Chief Product Officer, Zartico
• Timothy Bush, CMO, Visit Lake Charles

Finding the Harmony in Your Paid and Owned Strategies
Location: Main Salon G

• Jamie Claudio, SVP, Destination Strategy, Madded Media

Understanding Your Marketing Outcomes: With and Without Cookies
Location: Main Salon H
Destinations are increasingly tapping into one of their most valuable resources: data. Doing so allows them to better understand visitors searching for and traveling into their market, have real time revenue insights, and better segment and target their messaging. Destinations are using their first, second and third-party data in creative ways to achieve these outcomes. Join your peers from Visit Savannah and Discover Long Island as they walk you through the ways they measured their Connected TV campaign (without cookies) and helped increase bookings and Average Daily Rate for a new feeder market in conjunction with launching a new direct flight.

• Leroy Bridges, VP Sales, Tourism, Adara
• Lauren Cleland, Director of Marketing & Data Intelligence, Visit Savannah
• Allison Brown, Director of Marketing, Discover Long Island

• Amir Eylon, President & CEO, Longwoods International

The Power of Measuring Brand Health by Studying Official DMO Websites
Location: Main Salon G
Studying your DMO's official marketing assets is essential to building the foundation for long-term marketing strategies. This marketplace of ideas will illustrate how DMOs can maximize the utility of custom primary website research - from website usability and user experience research studies, to heat mapping analysis and user surveys. Come prepared ready to hear how you can optimize your official DMO website to best serve key user audiences and support your marketing programs with data-driven, actionable insights.

• David Reichbach, Senior Director of Analytics & Data Security, Destination Analysts
• Todd O'Leary, CDME, VP Marketing & Communications for Sonoma County Tourism

Roll Out the Digital Welcome Mat to Upscale your Brand and Increase Stakeholder Engagement
Location: Main Salon H
Visitors researching destinations need clear, accurate, and up-to-date information about all the attractions and restaurants they might visit — how can they plan a fantastic trip otherwise? Yet destination organizations aren't online traffic cops, so how can they help achieve digital excellence for their entire destination? Join this session to learn how Destination Queenstown helped local businesses upscale their digital presence across the most important social channels, ensuring that visitors say YES to all their destination offers.

• Theresa Fischer, Product Marketing Manager, Simpleview

• Derek Price, Director of Business Development, Expedia Group Media Solutions

Monitoring Your Vitals: Breathing Life into Your Marketing Intelligence & Performance
Location: Main Salon F
This session will showcase Tripadvisor’s powerful Destination Insights Platform (TIPs), a resource to which many destinations already have access, that can help inform their destination’s priorities, strategies, tactics, and measurement. Join us to hear how one destination is leveraging three key elements of TIPs: opportunity markets including growing and contracting markets; competitive insights including source market comparison, traveler review ratings, and average costs, booking windows, and length of stay; difference in behaviors, clicks, bookings, content engagement, and media impact between visitors who viewed the destination’s advertising vs. those who didn’t.

• Carol Johnson DMO Sales Manager, LatinAM & The Caribbean, Tripadvisor
• Jonathan Smithgall, VP of Digital Marketing and Media, Love Communications

Using Collaboration and Creativity to Power Values-Based Storytelling
Location: Main Salon G
Values-based tourism provides an incredible opportunity for tourism boards, hospitality brands, and local constituents to co-create travel experiences that are enriching for the traveler, support the communities visited, and are sensitive to the effects on our planet. This session will look at how destinations can effectively utilize inspirational content and contextually relevant media campaigns to attract the right travelers and drive them towards the right experiences. Through a deeper exploration of AFAR content and the work of select DMOs ,you will see how values-based messaging can be shared in the most impactful way to drive increased visitation of the world’s best travelers. Case studies include award-winning work from Explore Minnesota, Visit Buffalo & Niagara Falls, Explore Asheville, Visit Baltimore, and Colorado Tourism to name a few!

• Bryan Kinkade, VP Publisher, AFAR Media

Curating First-Party Audiences to Increase Visitation to Your Destination: A Case Study with Visit Savannah
Location: Main Salon H
In 2022, Visit Savannah sought to build a marketing campaign that would meet many objectives: increase airline tickets sold, keep current airline partners happy, position Savannah as a frontrunner for additional air service, and raise hotel revenues. Learn about Journera’s best in class data-driven solution that helped Savannah see triple-digit year-over-year visitation increases from key markets in this quickfire session.

• Lauren Cleland, Director, Marketing and Data Intelligence, Visit Savannah
• Maria Sheetz, VP of Sales, Tourism, Journera

• Samantha Gutting, Senior Vice President, Branson CVB
• Shalise DeMott, Vice President, Northstar Meetings Group

How Vulnerable is Your Destination Brand?
Location: Main Salon F
A healthy brand reputation is more important than ever before and can be destroyed at the speed of a tweet. Are you prepared to protect and defend your brand in a crisis? What are you doing to create positive brand perceptions now and get ahead of a variety of damaging situations? Learn how to mitigate risk and keep your brand reputation healthy. MMGY NJF can perform an audit of your organizations' past crisis responses, current crisis communications plans and analyze internal and external risk factors such as geopolitical, environmental, labor, strategic partnerships, customer satisfaction, social media presence, etc. Following the assessment, we create a critical issues map that identifies and categorizes crisis risks by level of severity and the likelihood to occur and then create crisis playbooks to address the various scenarios.

• Julie Freeman, Managing Director, MMGY NJF
• Joyce Kiehl, Communications Director, Visit Greater Palm Springs

Fuel Destination Discovery Through UGC and Short-Form Video Content
Location: Main Salon G
Authentic visual storytelling has never been more important for destinations as travelers’ appetite for glossy, hyper-stylized, over-curated, picture-perfect content seems to be waning. Join this session to discover how user-generated content, and in particular, short-form video content, is redefining destination marketing for modern destinations organizations.

• Alice Goode, Product Marketing Manager, CrowdRiff

Visit Mesa's Approach to Bucket List Fun with Influencer Support
Location: Main Salon H
The Visit Mesa Adventure Explorer Passport is a digital Bandwango passport that features a list of curated adventures selected by Wildjoy founder Lacy Cain. The list ranges from easy to moderate experiences and passholders are encouraged to tag photos along their journey. This recently launched passport showcases influencer partnership in a brand new way!

• Emilie Harris, VP of Sales and Marketing, Bandwango
• Michelle Streeter, Chief Communications & Content Officer, Visit Mesa

• David Chastain, Vice President, Travel & Tourism, Epsilon
• Lindsey Norment, Brand Director, Virginia Tourism Corporation
• Lauren Ward, Vice President, Marketing & Communications, Visit Franklin

A Pensacola Case Study: Opening New Marketing Channels, Cultural Awareness and Visitor Experience
Location: Main Salon F
Learn how Pensacola is using outdoor kiosks, cultural trails, and new digital touchpoints in their Visitor Center as well as how the destination expands new marketing and membership channels at their local airport.

• Sean O'Brien, Account Executive, True Omni

Hello Cincy Region: Embracing a New Regional Identity to Maximize Resources, Evolve Perceptions, and Generate Value for All
Location: Main Salon G
Divided by a river, a state line, and generations of cultural nuance, the Cincinnati region was far from a unified experience. For years the Cincinnati USA CVB and Meet Northern Kentucky had deeply fractured approaches toward leisure marketing. And even after years of economic development, audience perception still did not come close to the vibrant, culturally rich reality of the destination. But as the pandemic brought challenges, it also invited innovation. With a moment to reevaluate their approach, leaders on both sides recognized that the only way forward was together. Join us to learn how both DMOs embraced the value of their cultural contrast, creating a new regional identity, including how they established the new Cincy Region brand, completely reimagined their marketing programs, won over skeptics, and efficiently leveraged their resources to breathe new life into their leisure efforts, as a region.

• Jason Goldberg, Chief Relationship Officer, DestinationENV
• Randie Adam, CTA, Vice President, Marketing and Visitor Experience, Cincinnati USA Convention & Visitors Bureau