Encouraging Visitors to Play Their Way in California, the Ultimate Playground

Visit California is a Destination Marketing Organization (DMO) with over 25 years of experience in promoting California as a premier travel destination. The organization, funded through a unique partnership between the state and the travel industry, operates with a substantial budget of over $185 million (2023). As the leader of California’s brand messaging, Visit California previously anchored its campaigns under the “Dream Big” brand positioning. However, following a significant shift in traveler motivations post-pandemic, Visit California recognized a growing desire for experiences that foster joy, connection, and adventure.

This insight led to the evolution of the brand into “The Ultimate Playground,” a strategic repositioning that highlights the state’s unparalleled diversity of geography, activities, and cultural experiences. 

The “Let’s Play” campaign leveraged a robust mix of television, out-of-home, digital, and social media activations to showcase California’s diverse offerings — from wine tasting and rock climbing to luxury hotel stays, food truck adventures, and outdoor music festivals. By highlighting the playful spirit inherent in every experience, the campaign aimed to deepen the audience’s emotional connection to the state, reinforcing California’s identity as The Ultimate Playground and setting the stage for sustained brand engagement.

The initial roll-out of a rebrand update is critical, and transitioning from “Dream Big” to “The Ultimate Playground” required careful internal alignment and thorough message testing. Oomph, alongside Visit California’s partner agencies, began collaborating on this effort about nine months before the campaign launch. During these early planning meetings, our team contributed key ideas and strategic approaches to help shape the campaign.

Our focus remained on the web user and their position in the customer journey. Previous campaigns had not fully optimized the user flow, so we saw this as an opportunity to reimagine the experience. With paid media driving traffic to the website, it was essential to provide visitors with clear actions once they arrived. The advertising had done its job by capturing attention and sparking interest. Now, our challenge was to build on that momentum, guiding users from interest to meaningful engagement and action.

An interactive Quiz 

The Ultimate Playground campaign needed to accomplish a few things:

Our teams settled on a quiz as a way to engage visitors and serve them personalized content. Based on initial research, we decided an image-based quiz would be the fastest and most fun way to answer questions and receive a set of recommendations. Choosing preferences from a set of images is a quick way to make progress tangible. We limited the questions to nine, and most visitors took two minutes to complete the quiz.

Play Styles

The eight Play Styles were based on personas researched and created by the National Institute for Play, headquartered in California. Content creators at Visit California crafted a series of TV spots with glimpses into different styles of play. Our Play Quiz would highlight which Play Style matched the participant’s preferences, and our results pages served relevant, curated content, a similar Celebrity personality, and even a secondary play style. 

Email collection allowed visitors to send their play style results to themselves and allowed opt-in to more personalized content. Our team worked quickly over three months to solidify the approach, choose the quiz method and weighting criteria of the questions, and design the eight play style pages, two landing pages, a homepage takeover, and supporting pages for the new campaign. 

Our approach to the campaign was to support the bottom of the funnel and give visitors coming from digital ads something useful. Given the wealth of content the Visit California website contains, these broad Play Style personas made visitors see themselves in California. It brought curated content to them and provided what we thought of as a personal homepage with relevant recommendations. 

“Let’s Play” was the first part of a years-long brand campaign. We are already working on the campaign for 2025 which we hope will be even more engaging than the first!