Me, holding a baby turtle for the first time on a beach in Cancun :)
In June 2017, I was hired by a travel tech company (Travelpass Group in Lehi, Utah) to be a product manager for Cancun.com. For nearly a year, I led a team of writers, designers, and developers in relaunching all digital aspects of Cancun.com as a new platform for destination discovery, planning, and booking travel to the Yucatan.
In addition, I also drove the technical and branding portions of the "Cancun Experience Officer" Job Search — a global marketing campaign that we ran just three months after the site launch. This high-profile stunt ended up being wildly successful in terms of views and reach, and prompted the Mexico and Cancun Tourism boards to pledge us $2.5M to become sponsors.
Here's a behind-the-scenes look at the Cancun Experience Officer Campaign.
Cancun.com Relaunch v.1 (June 2017 - September 2017)
Biggest Obstacles: We had to start from scratch in building a new website/platform, and meet a tight three month launch deadline with very few resources.
Two very different product platforms made this process more complicated. I had to wear a lot of hats, analyze a lot of information, work with several internal and external teams, trust my gut, and get really scrappy :). But we had a great time! :)
Executive Buy-off in Cancun
Before we launched, I presented a 3 - month progress report to our partners in Cancun, as well as a roadmap of our plans to move forward. They were impressed with our work and gave their stamp of approval. A summary of the v.1 progress can be found here and in the presentation below.
The "CEO Search Campaign" (September 2017 - January 2018)
Our first teaser trailer for the CEO Search Campaign. I helped ideate and create the script for this video, which garnered over 6,000 views on the YouTube Platform alone.
The idea to run a job search / PR campaign to raise awareness for a destination wasn't a new concept to destination marketing (Australia's Queensland Island started the trend in 2009). But a company that TravelPass had acquired (called Jauntaroo) had once run a similar successful promotion, so we decided to piggyback on what they had done and try it with Cancun.com.
The campaign timeline in stages.
Biggest Obstacles: We started working on the promotion in mid-September, and had just about 45 business days to prepare before the campaign launched on November 8. The platform code that we hoped to use was out-of-date, so we had to squeeze that production into an already tight deadline with just a few dev sprints.
A rough wireframe of the application and voting platform, day 1/45 :)
The company also went through a round of lay-offs at this point, so resources were scarce and many of us worked overtime (wearing many hats) to make sure the campaign launched on time.
The way voting worked in the campaign was a touchy subject. I made sure we addressed early on in order to prevent blow-ups from angry candidates.
My coworker and I planned the entire campaign, including dates, job requirements, and media messaging. I wrote the application, job description, FAQ, home page, and branded application kit to make sure the campaign parameters were clearly understood by candidates.
I combed through the Terms and Conditions to make sure they were specific to the campaign and would accommodate for any edge cases we would encounter when receiving applicants.
I wire-framed functionality of entire platform for design and development, and my awesome UX Designer, Keirsten, designed the UI for the platform.
Our proprietary back-end admin for managing submissions, votes, scoring, and viewing applicant information.
I spec'ed and guided developers in building the application management platform, including voting, scoring, and flagging mechanisms. I also had to be very detailed in describing the site changes that occurred through the various stages of the campaign.
I monitored over 6,000 submissions using our admin tool and the flagging system we created, deactivating inappropriate submissions when needed.
Extracting Long-Term Value from Participants
Campaigns like this often burn brightly for a short time and then die out after the novelty has faded away. I knew this would probably be the case with our CEO campaign, but tried to transform as much of a our voting audience's initial enthusiasm into action by:
Inspiring them to travel to themselves and giving them a reason to do it. For example, I wanted to integrate a post-vote experience into the platform that would let users self-select the kind of vacation they wanted to take, and then showed them special rates for those days.
Concept of the post-vote modal we introduced to the campaign in December. If a user wasn't ready to start browsing hotels, we gave them the option of receiving the gift of a free mini travel guide by signing up for email. I wire-framed and wrote the content for the mini travel guide, which helped us acquire over 10,000 emails now used in content marketing initiatives. It also sent 66% more traffic to our product pages and increased conversions by 0.5%.
Treatment of the post-vote modal pages, with rates in orange only accessible after voting.
Social Media: Up Close and Personal
Our social media channels were hugely important for legitimizing the campaign and sustaining its momentum. We held multiple Live events on Facebook and Instagram to directly connect to followers and influencers around the world. Both of the events I co-hosted reached between 4-5k views.
We also repurposed user-generated content from videos and applications for use in social media. The #WhyWeTravel" series was a social media initiative I spearheaded to make the CEO campaign more universal, personal, and directed toward creating long-term aspirational content.
Candidate Communications
I wanted to set the campaign apart and took special care in making sure our communication with candidates was consistent, invested, and on-brand (especially regarding pieces like rejection letters.) Below are several examples of the email content (announcements, acceptance and rejection letters, and more) that I wrote for candidates as they moved through the hiring process.
Candidate Scoring and Selection
At the conclusion of the campaign, our internal hiring panel had to go through the task of watching over 6,000 application videos in just under a week. I built a scoring sheet in Google Docs and standardized our internal methodology for analyzing and scoring candidates based on the traits we were looking for.
Personally, I watched and scored over 1000 applications from the first round, and can say I would not this degree of YouTube blitzing on anyone :).
The Grand Finale: 5-day Live Interview Event
After whittling down the candidates to just ten individuals and teams, we prepared for our final 5 day Interview Event in Cancun. Our small team of 4 people had to do a lot of scrappy work before and during the event to make it a success. Some of these tasks included:
working with hotels and other sponsors, buying emergency tripods, assembling welcome kits, making sure everyone had water, printing out schedules 4 hours before candidate arrival, holding the camera for press conferences and live events, scheduling transfers, moving luggage, getting liability and media release forms signed, coordinating with transfers and hotels and flights, running around theme parks to get extra towels, etc. :)
And it was SO. MUCH. FUN. :)
We had a jam packed schedule, and had to make sure that the 20 individuals that were with us got to where they needed to go and didn't get lost (sometimes they did get lost). Here are a few snapshots from the event.
If you like suspenseful, exciting, and surprisingly emotional moments, you can watch a video of us announcing the winner on Facebook. If you listen closely, you might even hear me sniffling some tears of joy and relief (I was holding the camera). Note: it gets really good at 9:05.
Our Winner! Ivan the Intrepid
This was the winning video produced by Ivan Nanney of Boise, Idaho, who we chose as our winner. Our hiring panel chose Ivan because he embodied the values we wanted for the brand; he was creative, emotive, informational, funny, and demonstrated a lot of grit and scrappiness throughout the event. Way to go, Ivan :)
Successes and Statistics from the Cancun CEO Campaign
News of the campaign was distributed in over 430+ print and digital publications throughout the world. Some of these included:
Statistically, the campaign garnered over 34,000,000 video views, and had an estimated worldwide media value of $50 M.
Sponsorships and Partnerships
Thanks to the success of the campaign, the Mexico and Cancun Tourism Boards pledged $2.5M to Cancun.com and the CEO search campaign.
Xcaret (a theme/eco-park like Disneyland) offered free tickets to all participants of the campaign.
Multiple Hotels have sponsored stays for CEO and visitors during Ivan's six month stay.
So Emily, would you do it again?
Maybe. But not all of it again in under a year.