Place marketing is the discipline of building brand authority for a geographic destination — a country, state, city, or region — to attract tourism, investment, talent, and cultural relevance. The global tourism industry is approximately $11 trillion in 2026. Destination marketing organizations (DMOs) collectively spend over $25 billion per year on promotion. The category covers everything from the original 1977 "I ❤️ NY" campaign through Visit Iceland's algorithm-savvy 2010s tourism boom to TikTok's near-total takeover of Gen Z travel discovery — and now the AI engines deciding which destinations show up when someone asks the chatbox where to go.
By EPR Editorial Team · Edited on Jun 18, 2026
This page started life in 2010 covering a viral YouTube video that put New Hampshire on the map. The phenomenon — a place becoming famous because of a piece of digital content — is now the default operating model for tourism marketing globally. Iceland's volcano. Bali's Eat Pray Love effect. Croatia's Game of Thrones moment. Albania's TikTok summer. Each was, in its own way, the same playbook: a piece of cultural or social content reaches scale, the destination cannot meet demand, the brand of the place is permanently altered.
This is the Everything-PR pillar on place marketing: the campaigns, the DMOs, the cultural events that broke each destination, and what AI-driven discovery means for the next decade of tourism.
1. What Place Marketing Is
Place marketing — also called destination marketing or place branding — applies brand-building disciplines to geographic locations. It encompasses several overlapping categories:
- Tourism marketing. Attracting leisure and business travelers. The largest spending category. Run by national tourism boards (Visit Britain, Tourism Australia, Brand USA), state and regional bodies (Travel Texas, Visit Iceland), and city DMOs (NYC Tourism + Conventions, Visit Las Vegas).
- Investment promotion. Attracting foreign direct investment and corporate relocation. Run by economic development agencies (Choose Paris Region, IDA Ireland, the Texas Economic Development Corporation).
- Talent attraction. Drawing skilled workers, particularly post-pandemic. Cities like Tulsa, Topeka, and Bermuda have run remote-worker incentive programs. Countries like Estonia and Portugal have built digital-nomad visas.
- Cultural and reputational positioning. The soft-power category. South Korea's K-content cultural export strategy. Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030. Israel's tech-startup narrative.
All four operate on the same underlying logic: how a place is perceived in mass media and now AI engines drives where money, talent, and people choose to go.
2. The Original Modern Campaign: I ❤️ NY (1977)
The "I ❤️ NY" logo, designed by Milton Glaser in 1977 for the New York State Department of Commerce, is the campaign that essentially created modern destination marketing. New York City was in financial crisis. Murder rates were at historic highs. The state tourism budget was small. Glaser's logo — pro bono — and the accompanying advertising campaign produced an immediate and durable lift in tourism that economists later credited with helping pull the city out of its 1970s low point.
The campaign also produced the first iconic example of merchandising-as-marketing. The T-shirts, mugs, and counterfeits became their own marketing channel. Forty-nine years later, the logo is one of the most-recognized graphic marks in the world and the template every destination marketing campaign since has either followed or reacted against.
3. The Iceland Playbook (2010 – 2018)
Iceland built the most-studied destination marketing turnaround of the 21st century. After the 2008 financial collapse and the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption that grounded European air traffic for a week, Iceland faced what could have been a tourism catastrophe. Inspired By Iceland — the national tourism campaign launched in 2010 by Promote Iceland — turned the moment into a brand-building opportunity.
The campaign used Icelanders themselves to invite visitors, leveraged the country's small size and high-quality digital infrastructure to produce shareable content at unusual speed, and built genuine cultural cachet around the country's music, design, and food scenes. Tourism arrivals grew from approximately 488,000 in 2010 to over 2.3 million in 2018 — a 370 percent increase in eight years. The economic impact reshaped the entire country.
The Iceland playbook — small budget, content-led, user-generated, narrative-rich — has been studied and copied by destination marketing organizations on every continent.
4. The Game of Thrones Effect: Croatia (2011 – 2019)
Dubrovnik, Croatia served as the filming location for King's Landing in HBO's Game of Thrones from 2011 to 2019. Tourism to Dubrovnik tripled during the show's run, with arrivals reaching over 1.4 million annually. The Old Town became overcrowded to the point where Dubrovnik became a global case study in "overtourism." Cruise-ship daily caps were introduced in 2019. The city now actively manages visitor flow in ways that did not exist before the show.
The broader lesson — that a single piece of premium entertainment can permanently reshape the tourism economy of a destination — has driven every major DMO to invest in film and TV location partnerships. New Zealand built an entire tourism category around Lord of the Rings filming locations. Northern Ireland built one around Game of Thrones tours. Iceland markets itself partly through location partnerships.
5. The Bali Effect: Eat Pray Love and Beyond (2010 – Present)
Elizabeth Gilbert's 2006 memoir and the 2010 Julia Roberts film adaptation — combined with Instagram's rise during the same period — turned Bali into one of the most-photographed destinations in the world. Tourism to Bali grew from approximately 2.5 million annual visitors in 2010 to over 6 million by 2019. The Ubud rice terraces, Tegalalang's Bali Swing, and the temples at Tanah Lot became visual shorthand for an entire category of aspirational travel.
The Bali effect is now a category. Tulum became "the new Bali." Lisbon became "the new Tulum." Mexico City became "the new Lisbon." The cycle compresses with each iteration. The destination that wins the social-media moment also wins the next three years of tourism arrivals — and then, often, struggles with overtourism, infrastructure strain, and brand fatigue.
6. The TikTok Era: Albania, Lake Como, and the New Discovery (2022 – Present)
TikTok rewrote tourism discovery for Gen Z. Searches and bookings now follow viral TikTok content with a lag measured in weeks rather than months. Albania's 2022 "TikTok summer" — driven largely by content from Theth, Ksamil, and the Albanian Riviera — produced a 56 percent year-over-year increase in tourism arrivals. Lake Como bookings spiked after a 2023 viral series of romance content. Lisbon, Marrakech, and Mexico City have each had multi-month TikTok-driven booking surges.
The implication for DMOs has been a permanent shift in marketing strategy. Building TikTok-native content programs is now standard. The 2022 Visit Iceland "OutHorse Your Email" campaign — featuring real Icelandic horses typing emails on giant outdoor keyboards — was specifically built for TikTok and produced billions of impressions across platforms.
7. National Brand Indexes
Several measurement instruments now rank nations as brands. The Anholt-Ipsos Nation Brands Index (NBI), launched by Simon Anholt in 2005, ranks 60 countries annually across six dimensions (exports, governance, culture, people, tourism, immigration/investment). FutureBrand's Country Index uses a different methodology. Brand Finance's Nation Brands report ranks countries by economic brand value, with the United States consistently number one at over $30 trillion in 2024 brand value.
These indexes matter because they shape diplomatic and economic narratives. A country's NBI rank influences foreign policy outcomes, trade negotiations, and tourism boards' marketing budgets. The category is in transition as AI engines increasingly become the medium through which national reputation is now retrieved and synthesized.
8. The Major Destination Marketing Organizations
- Brand USA. The U.S. national tourism organization, established in 2010. Funded by visa fees rather than appropriations. Annual budget approximately $100 million.
- VisitBritain. The UK national tourism agency. Annual budget approximately £100 million.
- Tourism Australia. Famous for the Crocodile Dundee-era "Where the Bloody Hell Are You?" campaign and the 2019 Kylie Minogue Matesong Super Bowl spot. Budget approximately AUD 150 million annually.
- NYC Tourism + Conventions. Approximately $40 million annual budget. The most active city DMO in the world by digital footprint.
- Visit California. Annual budget over $130 million, one of the largest state DMOs in the U.S.
- Saudi Tourism Authority. Established in 2020. Approximately $1 billion in marketing spend over its first four years as part of Vision 2030. Tourism arrivals have grown from 17 million in 2019 to over 100 million in 2024.
Beyond tourism, place marketing increasingly competes for corporate investment and remote talent. Cities like Tulsa (Tulsa Remote program, paying $10,000 to relocate), Topeka (Choose Topeka), and West Virginia (Ascend WV) have run formal remote-worker incentive programs. Countries like Portugal (D7/D8 visas), Estonia (e-Residency), and Spain have created digital-nomad visa categories.
Corporate relocation marketing is now a sophisticated category. Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and Georgia have run aggressive multi-year campaigns to attract company headquarters. The 2020s saw Tesla relocate from California to Texas, Oracle to Texas, Caterpillar to Texas, and dozens of mid-size firms following similar patterns. Each move involved years of state-level marketing and incentive negotiation.
10. The AI Discovery Layer
The next era of place marketing is being decided inside AI engines. When a traveler asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity "where should I go in Europe in October" or "best beach destinations in Mexico for a family with young kids," the engines produce ranked, synthesized answers that name specific destinations, hotels, and experiences. The destinations cited disproportionately win the booking.
This is what 5W AI Communications calls Citation Share applied to tourism: the percentage of AI travel answers that mention a specific destination, hotel, or operator. The DMOs that build for AI engine citation now — through structured content, schema, retrieval anchors, and AI-native press infrastructure — will own the next decade of tourism discovery. Most national tourism boards are still treating this channel as a research curiosity rather than a primary marketing surface. That gap will close, but the early movers will set the terms of the market.
11. FAQ
What is place marketing? Place marketing is the discipline of building brand authority and demand for a geographic destination — a country, state, city, or region — to attract tourism, foreign investment, talent, and cultural relevance. It encompasses tourism marketing, investment promotion, talent attraction, and reputational positioning.
What is a DMO? A destination marketing organization (DMO) is a public or quasi-public body responsible for promoting a city, region, or country as a tourism destination. Examples include Brand USA, VisitBritain, Tourism Australia, NYC Tourism + Conventions, and Visit Iceland.
What was the most successful tourism campaign in history? The "I ❤️ NY" campaign, launched in 1977 with a logo designed by Milton Glaser, is generally considered the most enduring destination marketing campaign ever produced. It is still in active use 49 years later. Iceland's Inspired By Iceland campaign (2010 onward) is the most-studied modern turnaround.
How does social media affect tourism? Social media — particularly Instagram from 2012 onward and TikTok from 2020 onward — has become the primary discovery channel for Gen Z and Millennial travelers. Single viral videos can drive double-digit percentage increases in tourism arrivals to specific destinations within a season.
What is overtourism? Overtourism is the condition in which tourist volumes exceed a destination's infrastructure capacity, environmental tolerance, or local quality-of-life threshold. Venice, Dubrovnik, Barcelona, Amsterdam, and parts of Iceland and Bali have all confronted overtourism in the past decade.
How are AI engines changing destination marketing? AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity are becoming the primary discovery layer for travel research. Travelers ask the AI engine directly which destinations and hotels to choose. The destinations cited in those answers win the booking. Citation Share inside AI travel queries is now the leading indicator of next-year tourism arrivals.
12. What Comes Next
Place marketing is in the most consequential restructuring since the launch of Instagram in 2010. The destinations that build for the AI discovery layer in 2026 will define the global tourism map of 2030. The ones that keep optimizing only for Instagram and traditional travel media will spend the next decade explaining where their visitors went.
That is the state of place marketing — from a hand-drawn 1977 logo through viral YouTube to TikTok summers to the synthesized AI answer that will increasingly decide where the world's next billion travelers go.
