Destination Discourse

Small DMOs face the same expectations as their bigger counterparts, but their buying power keeps shrinking. Wes Rhea, President and CEO of Visit Lodi, joins Stuart and Adam to explain what that looks like with a $1.2 million budget and roughly $300,000 for advertising and marketing.Wes asks whether tourism vendors should price their products around a destination’s budget. Adam makes the case for sustainable businesses and new pricing models, while Stuart questions the lack of transparency. They also debate whether paid media delivers real value or simply produces numbers that reassure stakeholders.Wes shares how he stretches his budget: adopting technology early, helping shape products for smaller destinations, building his own AI discoverability tracker, and walking away from vendor relationships that stop making sense. Adam suggests putting more money into experiences and activations. Wes pushes back on the staffing and budget realities.Plus, Stu’s News on AI assistants that proactively manage work instead of waiting for the next prompt.Bottom Line: Small DMOs have an advantage in speed and flexibility, but that only helps if they use it. Experiment early, challenge what you’re paying for, and build partnerships that deliver value at your scale.

In part two of their reaction to episode 103's agency panel, Stuart Butler and Adam Stoker pull on the two threads the panel left hanging. First: at ESTO, 80% of the room said they had an agency of record - and nobody would say what they loved about theirs. The panel called that a definition problem. Adam argues perception is reality, and a gap that big is substantive, not semantic.Stuart offers a different diagnosis. Most DMO budgets go to paid media, and digital media is losing value fast - organic traffic to "things to do in Myrtle Beach" is down about 20% as AI overviews take over, while publishers stack more ads on fewer pages. Maybe the frustration isn't with agencies, but with what the money is buying. Adam shares an audit where an agency refused a client access to its own website backend, and they debate whether agencies with shareholders can afford to take a short-term hit for a long-term relationship.Second: if agencies should be valued for their brains, not their hands, how do you pay for strategy? They unpack the perverse incentive of percentage-of-media-spend pricing, why ad hoc buying sacrifices retainer efficiencies, Adam's experience with fractional staffing models, the idea of paying agencies to develop in-house talent, and why SaaS may be the agency survival plan.Bottom Line: When agency pay is tied to media spend and media value is shrinking, both sides lose. The fix starts with agencies willing to recommend what's right for the destination, even when it costs them.

This is part one of a two-part reaction to episode 103, where a panel of leading destination agencies agreed on two big things: AI is commoditizing tactical execution, and the DMO procurement process is broken. What they didn't settle was what comes next. Stuart Butler and Adam Stoker pick up those threads and try to move from diagnosis to solutions - with part two digging into where they disagreed with the panel.If DMOs can bring more execution in-house, the real question becomes how to value and pay for strategic thinking - and no pricing model for that exists yet. Stuart and Adam take on an RFP process that treats creative partners like toilet paper and lawn care, judges the future by the past, and asks agencies to give away their best ideas for free. They work through alternatives: paid sprints with finalists, an approved vendor bench with annual scorecards, initiative-based partnerships instead of agency-of-record retainers, and incentive structures where agencies take on real risk for a meaningful upside tied to the right objectives.Plus, Stu's News: the Tesla Roadster launch, and the AI-generated deepfake Elon livestreams that outranked the real event on YouTube - and what that means for trust in official channels.Bottom Line: None of these fixes work while DMO incentives reward spending the budget instead of producing outcomes. If AI handles the doing, DMOs need to get clear on what they're actually buying from their agencies - and build relationships where everybody only wins if everybody wins.

Every DMO says it wants community partners, yet most ignore the one institution already moving thousands of people into their destination every year. Kristen Adamo, President and CEO of Go Providence, joins Stuart Butler and Adam Stoker to argue that local colleges and universities are an untapped engine for both visitation and political protection.Kristen explains how city budget pressure on tax-exempt schools - through payment-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOT) negotiations - has opened the door for DMOs. Her team launched "Providence Hearts Brown," a partner campaign that became a citywide rallying cry after a tragedy on campus, and hosted Brown's roughly 300 internal meeting planners on a holiday site tour to win conferences. Stuart shares how Visit Myrtle Beach works with Coastal Carolina University and Horry Georgetown Technical College on workforce pipelines, culinary events and a marching band activation in London. Adam challenges DMOs to drop the fight over credit, sponsor college athletics and recognize that NIL now affects a school's ability to draw visitors. The group also covers parents weekend, campus tours, alumni capture and fam tours for elected officials.Bottom Line: Your local university already moves visitors and holds influence at every table you need. DMOs that partner with it build both a visitor pipeline and a coalition that will defend their funding.

For the first time ever, four of destination marketing's biggest agency partners sat down together, on the record, to talk openly about where this industry is headed. Dan Janes of KHM, Laura Libby of Miles Partnership, Barbara Karasek of Paradise Advertising and Craig Compagnone of MMGY Global join Stuart and Adam for the kind of candid conversation that usually only happens in conference hallways.Nothing was off the table. Why only about 20% of DMOs have any AI roadmap, and how agencies are closing the gap between super users and reluctant adopters. Why procurement processes built for defense contracts grade strategic partners like toilet paper and lawn care. Why, in a room of 225 DMO leaders at ESTO, 80% had an agency of record and not one would say they loved theirs. And why the addiction to vanity metrics and heads-in-beds KPIs leaves DMOs exposed when their funding is questioned.The panel agrees AI is commoditizing the doing, which shifts an agency's value to strategy, flexibility and shared risk. Each guest closes by waving a magic wand: modernize the legislation, rethink the funding model, privatize the DMO, redefine the AOR, and lead with unbridled optimism.Bottom Line: The DMO and its agency partners are facing the same existential question - prove your value or lose your funding. The ones who drop the transactional mindset, share risk and align around community outcomes instead of vanity metrics will come out the other side stronger.