Where you dine impacts where and how you travel. In fact, more than two-thirds of potential Michigan travelers say they're influenced by their destination's dining scene. To showcase the fresh and flavorful meals produced by the state's innovative chefs and dedicated farmers, Dotdash Meredith Travel Marketing (DDMTM) partnered with Pure Michigan to create a multiplatform experience showcasing Michigan’s pioneering culinary spirit.
We identified and interviewed nearly a dozen industry-leading chefs across the state, ultimately selecting five to showcase in Midwest Living and Food & Wine magazines within three spreadvertorials. An interactive destination site on midwestliving.com was built as a storytelling anchor for the program, sharing Q&A-style interviews, in-depth stories about Michigan’s agritourism destinations, and short videos on food innovation and sustainability through the eyes of two boundary-pushing chefs. Promoted within DDMTM’s portfolio of premium brands and across social media, the campaign utilized videos, Instagram reels, stories and posts to drive users to the destination site and inspire them to begin planning their flavorful Michigan getaways.
The Pure Michigan Culinary Innovation campaign was designed to expand potential travelers’ awareness of Michigan as a destination that offers exceptional culinary experiences while also respecting the state’s natural beauty and resources. The ultimate goal of the campaign was to get potential travelers to book a trip to Michigan and savor the state’s innovative food scene, including its sustainable restaurants, farm-to-table experiences, agritourism destinations and bountiful harvests.
Two 90-second videos—the centerpiece of the campaign—needed to encapsulate statewide innovation, showcase unique dining experiences available to potential travelers, and inspire viewers to dig deeper into the native destination site. In order to cover as much geographic and cultural diversity as possible, our videos focused on Carrie Masters, who runs a plant-forward, farm-to-table restaurant experience out of her home near Marquette in the Upper Peninsula; and Sarah Welch, who helms a meat-forward restaurant with an in-house butcher shop in Detroit. The contrasts of the soft-spoken Masters as she navigates the woods around her property to forage for hyperlocal ingredients and the extroverted Welch as she runs a fast-paced staff meeting and harvests produce alongside a local grower allowed us to give viewers a taste of the culinary and cultural breadth across Michigan.
Our Michigan Culinary Innovation campaign reached a total of 31 million people across print, web, video and social components. More than 18 million users were reached via social media, including via two reels (one for each chef) that were created as collaborative Instagram posts between Midwest Living and Pure Michigan. Both reels highlighted Michigan's unique culinary identity and local ingredients.
In the end, our efforts produced more than 235,000 page views, including video views through social media efforts that delivered users in the 18- to 24-year-old demographic, reflecting their presence on social media and preference for trending, visually appealing travel and food content. Thought-provoking topics featured in the videos—sustainable ingredient sourcing, local producer partnerships, community building—connected seamlessly with full-length digital articles on the native destination site.
