Through a multi-platform content partnership with the Guardian, VisitEngland put the 'staycation' firmly on the radar and had a direct impact on people's holiday choices.

1. Title: Visit England - The Guardian brings you England
Category: Best use of Content
We made over 20m holidaymakers fall in love with England again. Through a multi- platform content partnership with The Guardian, MediaCom and Visit England gave England’s fantastic variety and soul a home, putting the staycation firmly on the radar, and having a direct impact on people’s holiday choices. The partnership was so successful it has become a permanent editorial feature.
Background and Objectives: Persuade Britain that holidays at home are as good as holidays abroad
We needed to get the British public to look at England with fresh eyes. Britain is a nation of holidaymakers; we make 36 million trips abroad every year. Our challenge was to persuade Britain that the staycation is an incredible experience to rival going abroad.
Furthermore, as Visit England is government-funded and has a remit to drive tourism across the whole country, we needed to find a solution with real breadth and depth, not just focusing on flagship destinations like the Lake District.
Insight & Strategy: People have preconceptions that an English holiday isn’t for them
Preconceptions run deep. Massive chunks of Great Britain want to follow the herd and have some fun in the sun. We worked with the Guardian to unearth a core group of Independent Indulgence Seekers for whom variety and soul are more important than sun and sea, the very variety and soul that England has in spades.
We found that this audience weren’t considering the staycation because they didn’t feel it was for people like them. We needed to showcase real people’s experiences to counter these beliefs, the experiences of people like them. Advertising alone however couldn’t achieve this, the only way we could do this is through trusted editorial and the variety of authors who can truly bring it to life. A content-focused solution would give us both breadth of destinations and experiences and depth within each feature.
Our Independent Indulgence Seekers gain their holiday inspiration from both printed Newspaper travel sections and also digital travel sites – so partnering with a Newsbrand with a reputation for high-quality travel editorial was the perfect way to deliver this content to our target audience.
The Plan: The Guardian brings you England
We worked together to create an entirely new section of the Guardian’s travel offering, a section focusing purely and beautifully on England. This placed VisitEngland at the heart of the Guardian’s editorial offering as never before.

2. The centre piece was a video series presented by novelist and broadcaster Marcel Theroux – someone we had unearthed as a key opinion leader for Independent Indulgence Seekers – unwrapping the variety and soul of hidden England.
However, the campaign was much more than just some online video; we used the individual contexts of online and offline platforms to deliver a truly unique experience.
We launched the campaign with a free calendar that received masthead support on the Guardian. We then followed up by running a series of editorial supplements and coverwraps in print based around the soul of English staycation. These supplements were recreated on tablet, online and mobile platforms, each specifically tailored to work seamlessly on that platform.
We ensured that ‘right time, right place’ was at the heart of our strategy by making all of our digital activity time of day targeted by platform. So our mobile activity was activated in the evenings and online and lunchtimes, informed by what we know are key times in the day when each platform is most used.
Central to the success of this strategy was that it delivered a high frequency of space, allowing us to rotate in a huge variety of messages across the campaign period and meaning ‘new news’ was always at the forefront for repeat visitors.
Started as a one-off partnership to last just three months, this feature has now become a piece of permanent real estate. It has not only been incredibly successful for Visit England, but is also a feature of real editorial value to be cherished by our audience.
Results The Visit England tab generated almost 800,000 unique users, with 1.2m page impressions over the three month campaign (and is still live and clocking up more). The videos were watched by 80,000 people and the campaign in its entirety reached over 20 million people. 39% who saw the advertising and booked a holiday say the campaign had an influence on their decision to book a holiday. Of these people, 50% said it encouraged them to visit an area of England they've not visited before A third said they visited/will visit more areas than originally planned and 18% said it encouraged them to visit England rather than another destination. We learned that if the content is relevant, delivered via the right platform at the right time, it can be a true partnership, working for the advertiser, publisher and audience alike. The proof being that a 3 month partnership has become an integral part of the Guardian’s editorial.

3. Client view “Partnership is an overused phrase in media and rarely does it mean what it should, however in this case editorial, advertising and VisitEngland worked as one to produce something that delivered for each of us in spades. The partnership brokered by MediaCom was led by the Guardian editorial team, ultimately requiring significant trust from ourselves. But this trust was re-paid when they delivered a campaign that meant that no matter what time of day or what platform the user was interacting with, new and totally relevant VisitEngland messaging was visible to readers. It sat right at the heart of the travel offering, bringing credible, engaging content to the Guardian audience across all platforms and most importantly it changed perceptions and influenced travel bookings. And if you doubt it, go and look at the England section on the Guardian’s Travel channel and ask yourself how many other advertisers have a piece of real-estate like that, continuously running and populated by top class, integrity-driven editorial?” Tim Holt, Visit England Marketing Director