PROJECT
Visit Detroit
From 23 campaigns to 14, $296K freed up.
23 → 14
Active campaigns
$296k
Annual spend freed up
18%
Team capacity recovered
+17 pts
Scorecard improvement
CLIENT
Visit Detroit
ENGAGEMENT
Focus Blueprint, Advisory & Execution
SCOPE
Campaign Portfolio · AI & Digital Readiness
OUTCOME
23 campaigns to 14
About Visit Detroit
Visit Detroit markets a major metro with more stories than most destinations could dream of: pro sports downtown, Motown and music, automotive heritage, a fast-growing food scene, the riverfront, and a comeback narrative the whole country was watching. The destination wasn’t short on material. It was running too many of those stories at once.
01
The Opportunity
The team was managing 23 active campaigns. Some around conventions, some around sports and events, some around the city’s resurgence, several carried over from prior years because nobody had a clear reason to stop them. The director knew not all of them were earning their place, but there wasn’t a defensible way to make that case to the board.
02
What We Did
The engagement ran across three phases. The Focus Blueprint worked through all 23 campaigns one by one, cut the nine with no traceable tie to visitation, hotel demand, or the perception goals the board cared about, and consolidated to 14 with the rationale to defend the cuts. Monthly Advisory kept the plan honest and managed the stakeholder pushback from partners attached to the sunset campaigns, while tracking how Detroit was showing up in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. Execution retired the content that wasn’t pulling weight, restructured agency briefs to remove redundant work, and rebuilt the priority content with structured data so AI platforms could surface it.
03
The Impact
The scorecard moved from 24 to 41 out of 80. The director was walking into board meetings with 14 focused campaigns instead of 23, the team recovered 18% of its capacity, and Detroit was showing up in AI search results for the high-intent queries competing metros were still missing.
04