Picture an ad. Someone on a ridgeline at golden hour, back to the camera, arms slightly raised. A drone pulls back over a lake. A line of copy about the transformative adventure waiting out there.
Now, whose ad was it?
We’ve made that ad. So have most of the agencies in the tourism space. It’s a good image, and that’s the trouble. It promises escape and fresh air for every destination and operator that can afford a drone. Scroll through a week of paid social from any corner of outdoor travel and you’ll find the same couple on the same trail under the same headline about finding themselves through exploration. Ignore the logos and most of it could belong to anyone.
That used to be a craft problem. In the feed, it’s a money problem.
The feed doesn’t wait
Attention researcher Karen Nelson-Field has found that an ad needs about two and a half seconds of real attention before memory starts to form. System1’s research shows the dullest ads (those deemed through testing to elicit no emotional reaction, positive or negative) in fast-scroll environments get about one second, and only around a third of people look at them at all. That means roughly 75% of ad impressions receive no active attention, leaving billions in media spend unable to do its job.
So, as advertisers, a lot of what we buy in the feed gets served and counted, then forgotten.
When that happens, the media has to do the work the idea didn’t. Peter Field’s analysis of the IPA’s effectiveness cases found that dull campaigns needed roughly twice the media spend, sometimes more, to get the same business results as interesting ones. $198 billion is spent annually on dull media, with advertisers losing roughly 43 cents of value for every dollar spent in low-attention environments. Most travel brands don’t have twice the budget. For a destination spending a fraction of what a national advertiser does, that waste is worth some attention.
Being noticed is half the job
Travel has an extra problem. Someone can stop on your ad, enjoy it, and still remember the wrong brand. When every ad shares the same mountain vista, the same tranquil beach, and the same winding road, the memory that does form has nothing to hold on to. It goes to whoever the viewer already knows best, or to nobody.
Bucket list trips like this gets decided over months. The only thing that lasts that long is an impression of who you are. If a stranger can’t tell the ad was yours, it built nothing. The interest it sparked comes back later as a non-brand search you have to pay for again, and your budget starts performing like a smaller one.
The good news comes from Nelson-Field too. Working with VCCP Media, she found that ads with strong, well-used brand assets could drive memory and business results with as little as a second and a half of attention. Distinctiveness lowers the bar. The second you get can be enough, as long as it’s clearly yours. Cue smart branding and creative excellence.
The answer is usually already inside the brand
So where does that distinctiveness come from? Rarely from a better adjective. In my experience, it’s almost always something the brand already has and isn’t using, or has yet to realize.
I recently spent time inside the active-travel category, where every operator says its tour guides make the trip. They’re all telling the truth, which is exactly why the claim stopped working. But when I dug in and read the guest reviews, one company’s reviews sounded different. Other operators’ guests called their tour guides knowledgeable and professional. This company’s guests called them by name, often remembering three or four to a trip, and wrote things like “I wouldn’t hesitate to follow her anywhere.” The category was advertising résumés. These guests were describing people they missed after the trip ended. Interestingly, I couldn’t find any of it in a single ad.
I see that pattern everywhere. What makes a brand worth choosing is usually in the guest reviews already, or in the stories staff tell, or in some detail the locals hold on to. Then the category’s habits pile on top of it until nobody can see it.
Every destination has something like that. A local ritual, an embedded character, a way of doing things, a feeling visitors can’t quite explain but always mention. Finding it means looking with the client, past the brand guidelines and into what people actually say and do there. That’s the human truth. Build the work on it, use brand assets consistently enough that people learn them, and you end up with creative nobody else can run.
Creative and media are one decision
Better targeting can put an ad in front of the right person. It can’t make them remember it, or remember it was yours.
That’s why at MMGY we don’t hand creative and media off to each other one after the other. The plan decides where attention is possible. The work decides whether we earn it, and whether the brand gets the credit. We shape both together, while there’s still time to make each one stronger.
Here’s a test worth running this week. Take your last five paid social ads, cover the logo and show them to someone outside your team. Ask whose ad it is. Then ask how it made them feel.
If the answer to both is “not sure,” the media plan isn’t the first thing to fix. Your brand already holds the key: something nobody else has. The hard job is making sure the one second you’re given actually shares it with the world.