Travel Alberta has taken to Tumblr to show off the province as a winter destination.
In a series of digital ads appearing on Tumblr and across the Yahoo network, Travel Alberta is sharing content culled from its travel planner and guides for accommodations, parks and campgrounds.
The ads, by Critical Mass and C&B, focus on winter activities like dogsledding and ice walking. Using Yahoo’s targeting, Travel Alberta is serving the ads to adults across North America with a “high propensity for travel,” meaning they’ve recently searched for information about travel destinations on Yahoo/Bing or have consumed travel-related content on Yahoo sites. (PHD handled the media buy for the campaign.)
On Tumblr, the ads are appearing as sponsored posts, which have been available in Canada for about a year. The Tumblr posts include both campaign creative and content such as YouTube videos profiling tourist destinations like the Willow Stream Spa, the subject of a recent sponsored post.
The strength of using Tumblr and Yahoo simultaneously, according to Claude Galipeau, country manager for Yahoo Canada, is that brands get a mix of organic and paid media. Travel Alberta’s spend on Tumblr, for example, aims to increase its followers, creating a greater audience for it to tap into in the future. To date, the brand has mainly used Tumblr to re-share photos of Alberta destinations consumers have posted on Instagram.
Recent posts include landscape shots of the Rocky Mountains, a woman skating on an outdoor rink and a moose walking through a forest. Like the ads, the posts are meant to be aspirational and increase consumers’ desire to travel to cold weather destinations; a concept Travel Alberta is calling “Winterlust.”
“We wanted to inspire ‘Winterlust’ with beautiful photos and videos that capture the essence of Alberta, while offering helpful resources for people to plan their next travel adventure this winter,” Jasmine Thompson, director consumer marketing USA at Travel Alberta, told Marketing in a statement.
