Travel Ads Come to Life: Top 14 Ambient Marketing Campaigns of 2013

Breaking through in travel advertising is no easy task; we chronicle all the quality and even questionable attempts of destinations and travel companies to attract customers and visitors via video each week.

But as travel competition heats up in this over-saturated media messaging world, tourism organizations are pushed to come up with more creative ways to attract tourists. Ambient advertising, in which agencies take their messages offline and onto real-life objects, has experienced a boom among tourism organizations in the past year.

Ambient campaigns give travel and tourism organizations several opportunities to reach potential travelers face-to-face. Once in the location where phone booths, QR codes, and comment boxes are set up, and again when a video chronicling the event goes online. The best of ambient campaigns delight with their creativity in situ and have the right mix of digital tools to connect with these customers.

It also gives them the opportunity to interact with potential visitors who end up promoting the destination via tweets and photos of the novel offline experience.

We've complied 14 examples of clever ambient travel and tourism campaigns from this year.

Click through the gallery above for examples that include bananas acting as tourism ambassadors, 500-year-old cobblestone becoming QR codes, and Austrian Advent calendars singing out into Italian squares.