Please Do Not Buy Rectangles on the Internet

And Other Tourism Budget Advice

Last week, I gave some media buying advice to a DMO, and after writing the phrase "rectangles on the internet," naturally, I decided to regale you all with advice you didn't ask for. (also, this piece has nothing to do with that conversation - this is just how my brain works)

I'll set the scene: It's budget season, and somewhere in America, a group of tourism professionals gathers around a conference table and decides to buy rectangles on the internet.

Nobody is particularly excited about the rectangles. Nobody got into tourism because they dreamed of achieving a competitive CPM. Nobody goes home after work, pours a celebratory glass of wine and tells their spouse, “Great news, babe. We secured premium display inventory.”

The rectangles are simply there.

They were there last year. They performed within benchmark. The agency has several slides about them. Millions of impressions were successfully impressed. There may even be a heat map.

Most importantly, the rectangles are already in the budget, which means nobody has to make a fresh decision about whether to buy them. Removing them, on the other hand, would require someone to ask a surprisingly disruptive question:

Wait. Why are we doing this?

Before the digital advertising industry sends me a fruit basket filled with cease-and-desist letters, this isn't actually a column about banner ads. Sometimes you should buy the rectangles.

This is about all the things hiding inside a tourism budget that nobody would necessarily choose today, but everybody keeps choosing because somebody chose them yesterday.

And behavioral science suggests we're basically built to do exactly that.

Lesson One: Your Budget Is Making Decisions Before You Are

The first problem with annual budgeting is almost comically obvious once you notice it: we usually don't start with "a" budget. We start with last year's budget.

Imagine handing a destination leader $8 million and a blank sheet of paper and saying, “Here is everything we know about the destination today. Here are our strong seasons and weak seasons. Here's what visitors are doing. Here's what residents are telling us. Here's the lodging mix, economic outlook, competitive landscape and product. What should we do with the money?”

Now compare that with what generally happens.

Last year's $740,000 media line is sitting right there. So is research. And the visitor guide. And three trade shows. And sponsorships. And an agency scope. And content amplification. Susan has apparently been going to Chicago every spring since the Obama administration, and at this point nobody is entirely sure what happens there, but she always comes back with tote bags and says the meetings were excellent.

This is status quo bias and default bias doing exactly what they're supposed to do.

People tend to prefer existing conditions simply because they're existing conditions. Defaults reduce the cognitive burden of making a new choice, and tourism budgets come with one gigantic preselected option:

Do what we did last year, but adjust the numbers.

Sooo...a surprising amount of “strategic budgeting” is really editing?

Media goes up 6%. Research stays flat. Somebody says we need more video. There's a spirited conversation about TikTok. Susan gets Chicago.

Eventually everyone feels as though they have made dozens of decisions, when the biggest decision was made before they walked into the room: last year's choices got to set the starting line.

That's how rectangles achieve tenure.

Make the old ideas audition, too.

New ideas already have to audition. God, do they audition.

Bring a genuinely new $75,000 idea into a tourism budget meeting and suddenly everyone becomes a forensic economist. What's the ROI? Who else has done it? Can we see case studies? Could we test it first? Could we test it smaller? Could we perhaps test it for $4,000 using an intern and Canva?

Meanwhile, the $175,000 expenditure quietly renewed since 2017 is sitting three chairs away eating a muffin.

Make everything audition.

Old ideas may win their jobs again immediately. Great. Now we know why we're doing them.

Lesson Two: We Are Much Better at Adding Things Than Stopping Them

If status quo bias explains how things get comfortable in the budget, loss aversion and sunk costs explain why getting them out can require the diplomatic skills of a UN negotiator.

Suggest removing $100,000 from something we've funded for eight years, and suddenly everyone is writing fan fiction about the catastrophic future.

What if we lose market share? What if partners notice? What if our competitors are there and we're not?

What if Susan doesn't go to Chicago? Has anyone even considered Susan?!?

The burden of proof reverses. A new investment must prove that it deserves to exist. An old investment can sometimes survive until somebody proves that it is actively on fire.

Then there are sunk costs.

We've invested $150,000. We have come too far. We finally have momentum. Somebody championed this thing. A board approved it. There was a launch. People clapped. Perhaps there is branded merchandise.

God help us if there is a logo.

At that point we're no longer protecting an investment. We're protecting the story we told ourselves about the investment.

So we optimize it. Evolve it. Reposition it. Enter Phase Five. Eventually we add a dashboard and call it Phase Six.

Give your budget an exit door.

Every meaningful expenditure should have an answer to one simple question:

What would make us decide not to do this anymore?

That's different from asking whether something “performed,” because almost anything can be made to look like it performed if you choose the right measurement.

The campaign delivered 11 million impressions. The guide distributed 80,000 copies. The conference produced 63 appointments. The videos generated 412,000 views.

Excellent.

Did anything happen?

And before a dude in a quarter-zip comes for me, yes, I know tourism measurement has become significantly more sophisticated.

Which brings us to another trap.

Lesson Three: A Dashboard Is Not Accountability

Tourism has made real progress here.

We now have sophisticated platforms and data partners that can help destinations connect advertising exposure to what happens in the real world. We can understand visitation, movement, spending behavior and other outcomes with sophistication that simply wasn't available to most DMOs years ago.

That's good. Use the data.

My concern is what happens psychologically once we become very good at measuring something.

Concrete, quantifiable information feels accountable. And a dashboard showing that an exposed audience later arrived and spent money is unquestionably more useful than a report telling me we served 14 million impressions into the ether.

But better attribution doesn't eliminate the strategic questions.

Would those visitors have come anyway? Did we create incremental demand or intercept demand already moving toward us? Did we attract the most valuable visitor or the easiest visitor to convert and attribute? Will that visitor return? Did we create preference that compounds over time?

And here's the one tourism should be talking about much more:

What is the lifetime value of the visitor we're acquiring?

Lifetime value is deeply inconvenient to annual tourism budgeting because budgets adore fiscal years and human relationships with places do not care about fiscal years.

A visitor who sees an ad on Tuesday, arrives on Friday and spends $1,200 by Sunday is beautifully behaved from a measurement perspective.

Love her. No notes.

But consider another visitor who discovers the destination at 31, becomes emotionally attached to it, returns six times over the next decade, brings her partner, eventually brings her children and recommends it to friends.

She is enormously valuable. She's also an absolute nightmare for your quarterly attribution report.

This is where data can quietly stop being a tool for accountability and become a substitute for it.

Accountability isn't merely proving that something happened after we spent the money. It's continuing to interrogate whether we spent the money against the right problem in the first place.

A sophisticated dashboard can help answer: What happened after we did this?

It cannot decide: Was this the thing we should have done?

That's our job.

Measure the rectangles. Track them all the way from the internet to the restaurant table if you can.

Just don't let our increasing ability to measure a tactic become the reason we keep choosing the tactic.

Lesson Four: Eventually, the Things You Buy Start Telling You What Your Problems Are

We start with last year's budget. We become reluctant to remove familiar expenditures. We invest in increasingly sophisticated ways to demonstrate their performance.

And eventually:

The solutions we know how to buy begin defining the problems we see.

• If we have a media budget, we discover an awareness problem.

• If we have a research budget, we discover something requiring research.

• If we have event money, this feels like an excellent year to host one.

• If we have a content budget, someone is about to film another extremely attractive couple kayaking.

I have been here long enough to know that somewhere in America, at this exact moment, a drone is flying backward over a paddleboarder.

Familiar tools make certain problems easier to see. If you've built an organization that's exceptionally good at promotion, promotion naturally becomes the lens through which opportunities get evaluated.

But what if awareness isn't the problem?

What if Saturday is packed and Tuesday is a ghost town? What if July needs fewer visitors, not more? What if people are arriving but spending less? What if businesses are struggling to convert demand? What if residents are increasingly disconnected from tourism? What if a giant portion of your lodging economy barely participates in your destination ecosystem?

What if your destination doesn't have a marketing problem at all?

What if it has a place problem?

You can absolutely put $600,000 in media behind a place problem. Now more people know about your place problem.

Start buying outcomes instead of categories.

Instead of beginning with: How much should we spend on media?

Begin with: What does this place need tourism to accomplish next year?

Maybe the destination needs more October demand. Maybe it needs higher spending rather than higher volume. Maybe it needs a product people would actually travel for in February. Maybe local businesses need help turning visitors into customers. Maybe a fragmented lodging sector needs to become part of the destination's communication infrastructure. Maybe resident understanding matters more this year than another awareness campaign.

Once you define the problem first, the available solutions become much more interesting.

Because a marketing dollar does not have to purchase advertising to create demand.

It might improve an experience. Build a product. Train businesses. Connect the lodging ecosystem. Fund better visitor services. Solve an accessibility issue. Create an unexpected partnership.

Or it might buy a giant pile of advertising.

Great.

But now the advertising has a job.

The Budget Advice I Actually Want You to Take

Before approving a meaningful expenditure, ask three questions:

1. What are we trying to change?

If the answer is “awareness,” you're not finished. Whose awareness? Of what? When? And what do you hope those newly aware humans actually do?

Get all the way down to behavior.

2. Why do we believe this investment can change it?

“We received a compelling proposal” is not evidence. Neither is “other destinations are doing it.”

Explain how the investment plausibly gets you from the condition you have to the condition you want.

3. How will we know whether anything meaningful changed?

Not whether the tactic produced activity.

Whether the thing you said you wanted to change changed.

Use the dashboards. Use the attribution. Use the visitation, spending and conversion data.

Then keep asking questions after the dashboard turns green.

One Last Experiment: Delete the Budget

Not literally.

Before the next planning cycle, try the Blank Spreadsheet Test.

Don't open last year's budget.

Open an empty document and write one question at the top:

What does this place need from tourism next year?

Then start allocating imaginary dollars.

You might end up remarkably close to your current budget. Fantastic. You've independently validated many decisions that deserved to survive.

But I suspect you'll find a few surprises.

Maybe you're still funding a problem you solved five years ago. Maybe your lodging mix changed faster than your budget did. Maybe your weakest month receives almost none of the organization's creative attention while your strongest gets an enormous campaign because it always has.

And somewhere, buried in the spreadsheet, you'll probably find a rectangle.

Maybe it's digital advertising. Maybe it's Susan's trade show. Maybe it's a study, sponsorship, publication, campaign, contract or Phase Seven of the initiative with the really nice logo.

Don't automatically cut it.

Just make it answer the questions.

Because a tourism budget shouldn't be an archaeological record of everything your organization has believed over the past 15 years. It should be a statement about what you believe the place needs now.

So please, buy the rectangles if they solve the problem.

Send Susan to Chicago if Chicago is getting it done.

Print the guide. Sponsor the thing. Commission the study. Hire the agency. Make the kayak video. Frankly, I hope those paddleboarders have a wonderful time.

Measure all of it. Learn from all of it.

Just don't confuse familiar with necessary, measurable with valuable, or attributable with strategic.

Start with the place. Figure out what needs to change. Decide what has a reasonable chance of changing it. Give it money. Measure what happens. Then have the courage to change your mind.

And once in a while, open a blank spreadsheet.

Because “let's try something new” sounds risky.

But behavioral science suggests there may be four considerably more expensive words:

It's already in the budget.