New Orleans & Company Shares Unique Tricentennial Storytelling Opportunities
The 300th anniversary of New Orleans was a natural opportunity for residents and visitors to reflect on the city’s history – but New Orleans & Company saw the Tricentennial as an equally powerful moment to look forward, using technology to bring out some of the best stories. To make sure the whole world heard the call to tell those stories, Cision provided the perfect platform for the job.
national print ads
short film
Challenge
New Orleans & Company launched a series of events and initiatives throughout the Tricentennial, so it needed to keep up the PR momentum all year long.
Solution
New Orleans & Company was a longtime user of Cision, bringing together database, analytics, and monitoring tools to successfully execute every aspect of an earned media strategy.
Results
Cision allowed the communications team to keep up with media activities surrounding New Orleans and identify opportunities for targeted outreach and reporting on performance.
Tricentennial storytelling initiatives
New Orleans & Company went all out for the city’s Tricentennial. This included a short film featuring jazz greats Lloyd Dillon and Johnny Vidacovich sharing stories with a crowd in Jackson Square, with footage projected onto the iconic Presbytère behind them. There were also seven national print ads featuring archival photography from the 1940s to the 2000s and, most significantly, a shipping container using IBM Watson artificial intelligence software that would listen for “audio triggers” from those who step inside to share their stories.
These storytelling projects became film projections that could be recorded as beautiful, double-exposure videos.
“Everybody has a story about New Orleans, always. The thing is, we wanted to reach as many people as possible because many other municipal anniversaries will take place across the U.S. over the next few years. It was important we could offer something that stood out and was as totally unique and authentic as New Orleans is – different, really, from anywhere else.”
Tailored and targeted media outreach
“Basically, that’s where Cision, for me, is absolutely golden. I can go into those niche areas and pick and choose from there who will be best to contact for a given story. We truly can literally capture the fancy of many totally different and divergent groups.”
Turning media data into actionable insights
Given the pace of New Orleans & Company’s work, Sinclair needs highly accurate, up-to-date information on the editors and reporters most likely to cover her stories. That’s why she says she appreciates the details in Cision’s database on the current contact information of her influencers, as well as the ability to develop longer-term relationships with those who have given good coverage of the city’s tourism scene in the past.
Sinclair says she regularly has to give a breakdown of her results to the most senior leaders in the organization. Once again, she says Cision delivers:
“It really allows you to dig down into what is happening: who has read (a release), how it has been read compared to years past and so on. It’s capturing the real value versus just impressions. You can use it for many things.”
Long-term trending
Sinclair takes analytics one step further by archiving reports in a permanent Dropbox account in order to assess metrics in a more holistic and historical manner.
“New Orleans is very attractive to people of all ages and generations,” she explains. “While we’ve got an advertising firm that tries to stay on top of what’s trendy, it’s good to look back at what appealed to various generations in the past and what’s resonating now as our visitation grows, which it has, immensely, since [Hurricane] Katrina.” Sinclair knows Cision will be a critical part of her own story as a communications professional.
“The latest version is very user-friendly, and it’s more intuitive,” she says. “Once you start using it on a regular basis to go in and look at various aspects of your work, you’ll see the presentation of the reports just keeps getting better.”
“It's important for us to have the most cutting-edge software to build lists, communicate, monitor and measure in understandable metrics. I have watched Cision as it continually adds important technology to its arsenal through the years to offer the best product, and that is important to the success of what I do.”
Ready to bring it all together?
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