Pre-pandemic, Excellent Wolf Lodge devoted the the greater part of its media commit to programmatic. But as the family resort rebuilds just after the pandemic, it’s turning to Tv and producing a splash with a model-building campaign.
Higher-funnel metrics are now entrance-and-heart for the hospitality-centered manufacturer.
Before this thirty day period, Terrific Wolf Lodge went reside with an omnichannel campaign introducing viewers to the family members vacation resort. It labored with Horizon Media on media setting up and buying and Erich & Kallman on innovative.
The resort, started in 1997, commenced promotion on regional television in 2014. When the company designed up its model recognition with an audience at scale, it broke into nationwide Tv set in 2018 – and started off spanning the acquire funnel.
“Since [2018] we’ve been genuinely concentrated on understanding our [audience] targets’ media consumption behaviors, and then actually mirroring our media ideas [accordingly] by way of KPIs and imaginative,” explained Brooke Patterson, SVP of brand name activities at Terrific Wolf Lodge. 
The brand’s pre-pandemic media approach skewed toward decreased-funnel metrics like foot targeted traffic, payments, downloads and other conversion-based metrics, she reported.
But when the pandemic strike, it hit hospitality especially challenging.
“Every solitary a single of our lodges – our sole supply of revenue – was shut for months,” Patterson reported. “The pandemic had a big influence on us rethinking our media approach.”
“We didn’t truly have a need to travel paid media and desire when we have been closed,” she added.
In the wake of COVID, the lodge determined to “go all in” on brand making, such as for its newest campaign produced this month.
As it watches little ones trickle in at the time once again to fly down people waterslides, the manufacturer alone prefers to reign from the leading of the tube – I necessarily mean, funnel.
“We manufactured a mindful conclusion to commit a lot more in the top rated of the funnel and shift absent from some of the functionality-centered elements of our media strategy,” Patterson claimed.
Metrics that clearly show unaided brand consciousness are now the region of target. Specially, the brand name hopes to move the needle on upper-funnel brand wellness metrics, this sort of as branded search index functions and direct generation.
As Fantastic Wolf Lodge pursues Tv and upper-funnel metrics, the part of media invest heading to programmatic is heading down.
The lodge is not buying Tv inventory programmatically, but it does have programmatic ideas somewhere else. In 2019, for instance, 60% of the company’s digital purchases were being transacted programmatically. But today, that number’s down to 30%.
While the marketing campaign spans channels, like nationwide, CTV, electronic, social and even radio, the specially emotive mother nature of movie information in contrast with exhibit and other non-movie channels is what provides online video the largest potential as a branding car or truck.
“We totally anticipate Tv set and video clip to have the greatest [brand] impression,” Patterson mentioned.
