Best Travel Ads This Week: Welcome to the Era of GoPro Marketing

Welcome to the era of GoPro marketing in which destinations strap a camera on a staff member’s head to give potential travelers worldwide a front seat to the landscapes, activities, and people awaiting them.

This week’s roundup of travel videos features four destinations — New Zealand, Aukland, Portland, Chile — and Hyatt Hotels. And there will be GoPros involved.

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Travel Portland turned to local celebrities for its holiday ad campaign. The videos star comic book artist Steve Lieber touting the city’s tax-free shoping and musician Luz Elena Mendoza exploring the city.

It’s a bid to attract visitors and their shopping dollars, but given the context, the ad might be most effective at getting locals out around town during the holiday season.

Chile is calling all adventurers and extreme sports fan home in its latest video ad featuring sand boarding, snow boarding, white river rafting, and biking. Travel Chile seeks to raise brand awareness among American travelers and positions the campaign as a question: “Why not Chile?”

Aukland was recently named one of the top ten cities to visit in 2014 by Lonely Planet. And the New Zealand city is seizing the opportunity to make a major marketing push. Its most recent ad shows Aukland locals sharing what they love best about the city including its landscape, location, size, ambiance, and food.

This gorgeous drool-inducing video of New Zealand was released by the country earlier this fall to highlight the kinds of experiences that motivate travelers to fly around the world to reach its southern shores. The activities are more luxurious than most tourists can afford, but stir up wanderlust that can also be satisfied for less money in the same setting.

Hyatt Hotels targets millennials and business travelers in its new ad. The hotel promises to have a stock of commonly forgotten items so that guests feel like they’re at home. The video portrays “Busy Kate,” a millennial business traveler glued to her mobile device, as the exact type of person who will benefit from Hyatt’s new program.