Objectives

In an effort to increase visibility of Lexington, Ky., to potential visitors and tourists, VisitLex and Cornett worked together to craft fun, creative campaigns leveraging two popular Kentucky assets: horses and bourbon. The objective was simple: receive head-turning attention, spur social shares of the content and ultimately position Lexington, Ky., as a fun, must-visit destination.

Filled with beautiful countryside, famous horses and bourbon distilleries, Lexington is the ideal city to visit and experience these attractions first hand. To help draw the attention of both visitors and locals, Cornett and VisitLex executed six creative campaigns in 2019 to highlight these tourism attributes, gain more city awareness and increase outside engagement.

The ultimate success measure for CVB efforts is hotel rooms booked (not available at submission time). But our campaign KPIs include online reach, impressions and engagement which we correlate to increased searches on key travel sites and search engines. Website traffic is a secondary measure of success as many travel sites serve as direct booking agents, too.

Strategy and Execution

The Strategy resulted in six different campaigns showcasing Kentucky’s love for both horses and bourbon.

Highlighting the different facets of Lexington, Ky. four-legged celebrities, we implemented the following campaigns:

• Map to the Stars: A play on Hollywood’s map to famous celebrity homes, this map featured Lexington celebrities - famous thoroughbred race horses. This guide is complete with real names and actual addresses for Lexington’s most rich and famous. The map is available at the VisitLex Visitors Center and the Kentucky Horse Park, all displayed inside eye-catching newspaper boxes. To raise awareness of the Map to the Stars, we created a fun, yet intentionally misleading video to showcase these “popular celebrities” in Lexington.
• Mr. Rogers: In celebration of the highly-anticipated Mr. Rogers movie which premiered in November 2019, we dressed a horse in Mr. Rogers attire and created a fun series of advertisements that included headlines such as, “Won’t You Be My Neighhhbor,” and, “It’s A Beautiful Day in The Neighhhorhood.” Just as Mr. Rogers was known for his kindness and hospitality, so is Lexington, Kentucky. Like horses and bourbon, hospitality is a characteristic that makes Lexington a truly unique destination.
• Neigh-SMR:  We helped our forward-thinking pals at VisitLex dip their hooves into the popular phenomenon known as ASMR in a fun and unique way that only the ‘Horse Capital of The World’ could pull off. The nearly 2-minute video of the sounds Hank the Horse makes eating entered Lexington into an admittedly odd trend, but a trend nonetheless.
• Horse Walks Into A Bar: Hank the Horse also made featured appearances in the “A Horse Walks Into a Bar” series, which included four videos that each put a Lexington spin on a well-known joke. It playfully allowed VisitLex to mix the two main pillars of its efforts – horses and bourbon.

Horses were one half of the VisitLex digital strategy. Bourbon was the other. Our campaign executions included:

• Bourbon Camo: A popular sport in Lexington is bourbon hunting. Bourbon aficionados from all over the world come to town in the hopes of scoring rare bottles of Kentucky’s finest bourbon, even sometimes camping outside of liquor stores when distilleries drop new, limited releases. We created the first and finest line of Bourbon Camouflage® -- full bleed t-shirts printed to look like bourbon aisles in three exciting patterns (Liquor Barn, Kroger, and Rite Aid). The shirts allegedly help hide rare shelf finds while the wearer shops. Or disguises the wearer from other hunters. The effort produced share-worth content to help support Lexington’s position as the premier bourbon destination. 
• Alexa, Bourbon Barrel: Trying some of Lexington’s delicious bourbon will have you wishing Alexa could bring you a barrel home. In efforts to reenact that wish, we rolled a real (but empty) barrel of bourbon up to someone’s front door step using the Nest doorbell camera to capture the footage. The video brought viral-like engagement to VisitLex during the holiday season because of its fun and relevant nature.

Results

The total campaign increased Lexington’s visibility on social media and beyond. Neigh-SMR became a bonafide viral success, hitting over 1.4 million YouTube views (zero paid spend supporting it) and earning a future highlight in YouTube’s own “View in 2” campaign highlighting best-in-class executions. Mr. Rogers was featured as an Editor’s Pick in Ad Age and earned placement online at USAToday.com, Yahoo News and Horse Nation. Bourbon Camo pictures were passed around enough to gain the attention of Ad Week, Paste and Travel Vertical. Alexa, Bourbon Barrel notched over 350,000 views on Facebook and Instagram in just the last two weeks of the year.

Most importantly, the combined campaigns led to over 50 million online impressions for the calendar year 2019. While final year travel data has yet to be compiled, searches for Lexington-area destinations were up over 25% on sites like Expedia just halfway through the year. One of our target markets (where social content was served via paid media) showed a 65% lift in Expedia searches in the latter half of 2019.

Additionally, the social conversation around Lexington through these campaigns has resulted in a 360% year-over-year lift in organic search impressions for the brand. The resulting website traffic is 130% year-over-year improvement.

The VisitLex efforts around Horses and Bourbon are lifting consumer awareness of the market and its attractions, increasing searches and bookings to the market and driving more and new dollars to the local economy.

Media