Overview
Modern destination marketing often reduces cities to a handful of overused landmarks and curated itineraries, neglecting the unique and personal ways people actually experience a place. This Time in Seattle reimagines how visitors connect with the city, using an experimental, emotion-driven approach rooted in cinematic motion, poetic copy, and layered sensory cues. The project challenges typical travel narratives by encouraging travelers to discover their own version of Seattle each time they visit, highlighting the city’s rich complexity beyond what guidebooks can offer.
Skills Used
Advertising Campaign
Motion Design
Image Manipulation
Industry
Tourism
The Challenge
Seattle’s tourism image is often simplified into clichés: rain, coffee, and skyline views. While iconic, these symbols do little to speak to travelers who value authenticity, spontaneity, and deeper human connection. The challenge was to break free from one-dimensional marketing and create a campaign that mirrors the lived, layered, and ever-shifting experiences that people carry away from Seattle. How can a campaign capture a city that feels new every time you arrive?
The Solution
This Time in Seattle positions the city as a living, breathing storyteller through a fragmentary and immersive motion campaign. Combining textural visuals, kinetic typography, and poetic short-form narratives, it reframes Seattle as a place to feel rather than simply see. Social media activations, transit touchpoints, and short video vignettes showcase moments of discovery : a missed bus stop, a whispered jazz note, a rainy street that calls you back : encouraging visitors to trust their instincts and design their own adventure, no matter how many times they return.
The Result
The campaign concept demonstrates how destination branding can break away from rigid, highlight-focused strategies to embrace emotion-first storytelling. By celebrating mood, curiosity, and memory as drivers of travel, This Time in Seattle helps position the city as a personal, ever-changing experience. It shows how a tourism brand can build genuine bonds with travelers, sparking curiosity to explore Seattle again and again in their own way.
