Visit California is a Destination Marketing Organization (DMO) with over 25 years of experience in promoting California as a premier travel destination. The organization, funded through a unique partnership between the state and the travel industry, operates with a substantial budget of over $185 million (2023). As the leader of California’s brand messaging, Visit California previously anchored its campaigns under the “Dream Big” brand positioning. However, following a significant shift in traveler motivations post-pandemic, Visit California recognized a growing desire for experiences that foster joy, connection, and adventure.

This insight led to the evolution of the brand into “The Ultimate Playground,” a strategic repositioning that highlights the state’s unparalleled diversity of geography, activities, and cultural experiences. 

The “Let’s Play” campaign leveraged a robust mix of television, out-of-home, digital, and social media activations to showcase California’s diverse offerings — from wine tasting and rock climbing to luxury hotel stays, food truck adventures, and outdoor music festivals. By highlighting the playful spirit inherent in every experience, the campaign aimed to deepen the audience’s emotional connection to the state, reinforcing California’s identity as The Ultimate Playground and setting the stage for sustained brand engagement.

The initial roll-out of a rebrand update is critical, and transitioning from “Dream Big” to “The Ultimate Playground” required careful internal alignment and thorough message testing. Oomph, alongside Visit California’s partner agencies, began collaborating on this effort about nine months before the campaign launch. During these early planning meetings, our team contributed key ideas and strategic approaches to help shape the campaign.

Our focus remained on the web user and their position in the customer journey. Previous campaigns had not fully optimized the user flow, so we saw this as an opportunity to reimagine the experience. With paid media driving traffic to the website, it was essential to provide visitors with clear actions once they arrived. The advertising had done its job by capturing attention and sparking interest. Now, our challenge was to build on that momentum, guiding users from interest to meaningful engagement and action.

An interactive Quiz 

The Ultimate Playground campaign needed to accomplish a few things:

Our teams settled on a quiz as a way to engage visitors and serve them personalized content. Based on initial research, we decided an image-based quiz would be the fastest and most fun way to answer questions and receive a set of recommendations. Choosing preferences from a set of images is a quick way to make progress tangible. We limited the questions to nine, and most visitors took two minutes to complete the quiz.

Play Styles

The eight Play Styles were based on personas researched and created by the National Institute for Play, headquartered in California. Content creators at Visit California crafted a series of TV spots with glimpses into different styles of play. Our Play Quiz would highlight which Play Style matched the participant’s preferences, and our results pages served relevant, curated content, a similar Celebrity personality, and even a secondary play style. 

Email collection allowed visitors to send their play style results to themselves and allowed opt-in to more personalized content. Our team worked quickly over three months to solidify the approach, choose the quiz method and weighting criteria of the questions, and design the eight play style pages, two landing pages, a homepage takeover, and supporting pages for the new campaign. 

Our approach to the campaign was to support the bottom of the funnel and give visitors coming from digital ads something useful. Given the wealth of content the Visit California website contains, these broad Play Style personas made visitors see themselves in California. It brought curated content to them and provided what we thought of as a personal homepage with relevant recommendations. 

“Let’s Play” was the first part of a years-long brand campaign. We are already working on the campaign for 2025 which we hope will be even more engaging than the first!

AskRI is a digital platform providing Rhode Island residents with free access to some of the top educational and research tools, along with links to many state resources. A collaboration among the state government and various libraries and agencies, AskRI is essentially a 24/7 help desk for Rhode Islanders.

The platform’s structure has three main approaches:

Fundamentally, it’s an incredible resource! But, as AskRI grew over time, it became increasingly difficult for users to find the information they needed — and harder for site managers to organize, update, and expand the content.

Aiming to make the platform more user-friendly all around, its owners opted for a comprehensive redesign with a few primary goals:

Through a quick Discovery phase, we uncovered a diverse user base with a broad range of needs. Our next challenge was to create an energetic brand identity and a more intuitive way to organize the platform.

Visual Branding

Digital Platform

The AskRI team loved the new brand identity, which evokes curiosity with visual elements that represent thinking and asking questions. Two thought bubbles form the shape of Rhode Island for the logo, while images of inquisitive people are featured throughout the site. In addition, the new colors bring fresh energy to the brand while preserving a sense of trust and authority.

The redesign not only improved the content’s organization and accessibility, it also fosters a greater sense of interaction with platform users. Visual personas provide an intuitive starting point for exploration, backed up with curated resource lists. A new dropdown menu titled “Find Resources for You” speaks directly to target audiences, while a new “Explore Topics” section offers lists of state resources grouped by user needs (small business, health, families, etc.).

Finally, as the most interactive part of the platform, the redesigned FAQs section is now the “Ask a Librarian” page, where users can submit questions on any topic. The most common platform-related questions get published to the site as a list of answers that users can browse. Input from users will not only inform the kinds of content that goes on the site, but may also spur access to new tools and databases.

The interface was designed to follow many conventions of online banking in order to leverage customers’ intuition and expectations, but the result is softer and less like a typical financial institution. The concept of MyFund is similar to online banking in that the customer can make a donation through an online portal from a predetermined balance. The differences are in the workflow; MyFund transactions occur both on and offline. All transactions are guaranteed to go to registered 501c3 organizations in good standing with the IRS, therefore, when a request is made to send money to an organization, the final check is cut by a person. A customer may cancel a transaction before it has been fully processed but the back-office may also cancel it if the organization is not compliant. These nuances needed to be clear in the interface and messaging.

All along the way, the wireframes and designs were verified with real people. At the early stages, wireframes and workflows were tested with online tools and an HTML prototype. This not only gave the development team a live example of a customer’s workflow, but it gave the entire team a clear picture of how the responsive site was going to work.

While the software was nearing completion and a beta launch, Oomph began work on a marketing site to promote the new web app. We were involved in writing the copy and crafting the story for prospective customers.

We scripted a series of videos to help explain how individual features worked, while one explainer video on the marketing site gave new customers a broad overview of why this platform is such a great idea. A list of primary features as well as some social proof in the form of personal testimonials help frame the platform as more than just a convenience — it can really help you make a difference in your community.

See the marketing site in action at MyFund.org.