Wanderlove

a pandemic recovery campaign

My Home Virginia is a narrative-driven video series developed for Virginia Tourism Corporation that follows prominent Virginia-based personalities to the places they love and are inspired to call home. The concept was rooted in a simple insight: locals tell a destination's story with an authenticity that no traditional ad campaign can replicate. Rather than broadcasting Virginia's beauty from the outside in, we turned the camera over to the people who live it every day.

The series spanned three seasons and evolved with each chapter. Season 1 followed award-winning National Geographic photographer and filmmaker Trevor Frost through Virginia's wild landscapes — the Great Dismal Swamp, False Cape State Park, and Grayson Highlands. Season 2 shifted to Virginia's culinary community, profiling chefs and bakers whose kitchens are as much a part of the Commonwealth's identity as its mountains and coastlines. Season 3 spotlighted Virginia's athletic community, featuring a world-record-breaking marathon runner, a 12-time whitewater world champion, and the coach of the longest-running women's pro cycling team in the world.

Each episode was crafted to inspire travel while feeling more like a short documentary than a tourism spot — cinematic, character-driven, and deeply rooted in place. The series aired across Virginia is for Lovers owned channels including virginia.org, YouTube, and Virginia Welcome Centers.

Across three seasons and nine episodes, My Home Virginia accumulated over 2.2 million views and more than 91,600 hours of watch time on YouTube. The series generated 362,000+ impressions with a 5.1% click-through rate, well above the platform average. Individual episodes regularly cleared 200,000–300,000 views, some gaining over 305,000 views and nearly 16,000 hours watched.

Wanderlove was an integrated content marketing campaign developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The campaign pivoted VTC's strategy from out-of-state audience targeting to promoting safe, low-risk road trips and outdoor experiences for in-state travelers. My work contributed to a multi-channel effort spanning blog content, video production, social media, influencer partnerships, and co-branded activations with partners like Matador and Airstream.

Most importantly, the campaign was designed to be modular for other in-state tourism partners to participate in. We created templates, graphic tool kits, and tutorials for partners, some with minimal budgets and manpower, to create professional-level marketing assets for free.

WanderLove went on to earn back-to-back U.S. Travel Association Mercury Awards in 2021 and 2022 — among the most prestigious honors in U.S. travel and tourism marketing — recognizing the campaign's success in driving consumer engagement and supporting Virginia's tourism industry during one of its most challenging periods.