COVID-Safe Travel: Peaceful Side of the Smokies
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COVD-Safe Travel on the Peaceful Side of the Smokies
The Blount Partnership is one of our longest running relationships to date, having worked with them on a number of commercials, events and social media marketing. One of its many arms is Blount Tourism – the Peaceful Side of the Smokies, which works to promote the area as an incredible destination for travel and events.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Peaceful Side of the Smokies team came to us with a new marketing goal: to present Blount County as a safe place to explore and visit during that time. With a scope of reaching both the community-at-large and travelers from across the country seeking a safe getaway, we needed to highlight all aspects of the county with a singular message. The final deliverable list and the logistical components alone made this one of the most collaborative and production-heavy projects our team has ever worked on, and man, it was a blast.
crafting the message
While brainstorming our plan for this project, we wanted to identify a way to put a positive twist on the change in lifestyle that COVID was creating. Our final decision was the use of a mask. A branded mask would allow us to use recognizable imagery surrounding COVID without having exhaustive dialogue about the pandemic itself, and since Blount County is an outdoor haven, we loved the idea of people taking off their masks to get a breath of fresh air in some of their most scenic spots. We settled on “The Peaceful Side of the Smokies Has You Covered” to play on the imagery of a mask covering your face, while letting visitors and citizens know they are a priority to the Blount Partnership.
the peaceful side has you covered
12 days of production, 160 hours of post production, and over 40 deliverables is what it would take to get this project done. Production involved both indoor and outdoor locations, going between businesses in the region to beautiful mountain top hikes and everything in between. It was quite the adventure that we were thrilled to be on.
Our pre-production team did an incredible job booking a variety of talent, scheduling shoot days, and getting locations nailed down.
At the end of it all, we were able to deliver a Broadcast-quality, core video to introduce the campaign messaging on television and social media, as well as numerous supplemental videos to showcase the various aspects of visiting Blount County – like “Adventure,” “Biking” and “Fine Dining.” Each of these videos were cut for both social media feed and story usage, and several were utilized in paid campaigns targeting audience demographics and interests reflected in the video (i.e. the “Biking” video targeting biking enthusiasts in select markets across the region). We also delivered high-quality photography to support this message to be used on billboards, in print and on social media.
If you’re interested in finding out what it would take to make your project or vision come to life, reach out to us. We love to share our work and are happy to talk through more samples and what type of planning went into this to make it a reality!
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