Destination advertising: With the Greater Raleigh CVB's advertising and marketing communications agency of record, Avenir Bold, continued to expand as well as optimize year-over-year a robust ad plan with leisure visitor, meeting group and sports event-planning markets that especially leveraged various new video ads; Avenir Bold placements drove the following results in calendar year 2025:
46 million impressions
$12.3 million in estimated economic impact from hotel bookings, reported by data partner Adara (result of streaming and linear TV advertising through a Spectrum/Adara partnership program); this spending was 38% of all hotel revenue analyzed by Adara in the Raleigh, N.C., market (which was $32.8 million total)
40:1 return on ad spend via Adara (for context, 8-10:1 is considered excellent)
$44.7 million in in-market spending tracked by Epsilon (native advertising and online video)
Website: Worked alongside the Bureau's Destination Data, Technology and AI Department to optimize visitRaleigh.com content for large language models, strengthening the destination’s visibility in search and AI-powered discovery; as a result, website URLs appeared 110 million times in Google searches, with nearly three million website visits and generating 6.9 million pageviews.
Social media: Earned 40 million impressions, drove 400,000 clicks to visitRaleigh.com and gained 50,000 new followers across Facebook and Instagram during the year; contributing to these results was a new social media program enlisting local creators to produce short-form video content for the Bureau’s use in leisure marketing efforts.
Raleigh Beer Trail: For 2026, continued the mobile-exclusive Raleigh Beer Trail program offering a digital Passport with GPS-confirmed check-ins at the Raleigh area's 40+ breweries and integrating electronic submissions for prize redemption.
Group market projects:
Continued to support the Bureau's Sales, Destination Services and Sports Marketing Departments by producing website, bid book and social media content as well as email campaigns for meeting professionals and sports event planners.
Assisted Sales and Destination Services teams in pre- and post-promotions for their key Bureau-hosted events.
Worked with vendor STAR to produce an immersive, interactive 10' x 20' Sales tradeshow booth for major industry shows across the country in the 2026-2027 fiscal year.
Awards:
Won three major N.C. Travel Industry Association Tourism Achievement Awards at the N.C. Tourism Leadership Conference:
Platinum for 2024 Annual Meeting (Community Stakeholders category);
Platinum for the digital Raleigh Beer Trail (Technology and Innovation Award);
and Platinum for the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball First and Second Rounds (Special Event Marketing category).
