THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media and digital. View this season's finalists!

First in Fright

Entered in Travel & Tourism

Objective

For decades, tourism marketing has been a series of postcard-perfect stills and generalized messages of “we’re the perfect destination for you.” The modern traveler is looking for more personalized experiences, with Skift’s 2023 Trends Report finding that campaigns targeting niche consumer segments are seeing 27% higher engagement rates than mass marketing campaigns.  

Knowing this, Visit North Carolina flipped the narrative, asking, “which travelers are perfect for us?” Paranormal tourism is a $30B industry in the United States and growing. With hundreds of years of history and haunts, we sought to take advantage of our natural– and supernatural–assets and drive increased tourism and engagement through integrated storytelling.  

Strategy

With this mission in mind, we told the story of how North Carolina is not only First in Flight but also First in Fright

To raise awareness of North Carolina’s haunted happenings, Visit North Carolina created a robust ecosystem of spine-chilling content to generate awareness for the state’s spooky sites and capture highly engaged leads. To capture this audience, we made sure the devil was truly in the details. 

Results

Launched on Friday, September 13, the First in Fright campaign gained quick traction. In an unexpected and tragic twist, Hurricane Helene devastated much of Western North Carolina just weeks after the campaign launched. This caused us to pause or cancel all paid activations.  

Normally, this would be a significant hurdle for a campaign with results hard to recoup. In the case of First in Fright, it revealed the power of storytelling, owned channels, and significant—primarily organic—results. 

Beyond quantitative success, First in Fright was an opportunity for Visit North Carolina to serve a new niche of travelers and a valuable opportunity to connect with North Carolinian communities of all sizes and tell their stories. 

Media

Video for First in Fright

Entrant Company / Organization Name

lūquire, Visit North Carolina

Links

Entry Credits