LA Tourism × GumGum

Contextual Targeting Meets Immersive Creative

Winner, Best Regional Campaign – The Wires Awards 2025

Overview

To promote Los Angeles as a premier travel destination, Allied partnered with the Los Angeles Tourism & Convention Board and GumGum to create a campaign that captured attention through innovation. By combining contextual targeting with high-impact creative, the campaign invited travelers to explore LA in a new way-driving engagement well above industry benchmarks and earning Best Regional Campaign honors at The Wires Awards 2025.

Challenge

In a crowded digital travel landscape, LA Tourism needed to break through conventional display formats and connect with audiences in a way that mirrored the energy and diversity of Los Angeles. The goal was to increase awareness and engagement with potential visitors while effectively communicating the city's unique appeal.

Solution

Working with GumGum, Allied delivered a campaign that paired immersive ad experiences with precise contextual placement to maximize visibility and engagement.

• Contextual alignment: Identified ideal placements across events, attractions, and entertainment content where travel intent was strongest.

• Innovative creative: Deployed GumGum's Hang Time and In-Screen Expandable Video units to keep the brand in view as users interacted.

• Attention optimization: Used GumGum's Creative Attention Tracker to understand which design elements captured user focus and refine engagement.

Results

The campaign's immersive formats outperformed benchmarks across key performance metrics:

• 1.24% Click-Through Rate (CTR)
• 3.84% Engagement Rate (Hang Time)
• 74.28% Video Completion Rate (VCR)

These results underscored the power of attention-driven creative in travel media and set a new standard for performance in destination marketing.

GumGum's high-impact units have consistently delivered results above benchmark, so we were eager to test the new Hang Time unit. Our initial test generated engagement twice as strong as the current units we are running, and we are now including it in multiple plans globally going forward.

• Jack Lancaster, Vice President, Media, Allied Global Marketing

Why It Worked

The LA Tourism × GumGum campaign demonstrated how thoughtful creative execution and contextual precision can drive meaningful engagement in the travel sector-translating attention into measurable impact and recognition from the industry's leading performance marketing awards.