Kerala Blog Express is one of the most ambitious creator programmes any tourism board runs. Going into a new season, applications had softened and questions were circulating in the blogging community that nobody had yet answered. This was not a reach problem. Reach would have made it worse.

We did not buy impressions. We went to the people who had actually been. We produced a testimonial film that answered the questions creators were really asking rather than the ones the brochure answered, then approached opinion leaders among previous participants and asked them to publish it and engage the doubters directly, in public. We used our own channels to field the rest.

Former participants became the campaign. The questions were answered by the only people with standing to answer them, and the tone of the conversation turned within weeks. The campaign hashtag generated millions of impressions over a single month, and applications recovered comfortably past where the programme needed them to be.