THE CONTEXT
In 2021, the travel and tourism industry was doing one thing almost universally: waiting. Waiting for vaccines to roll out. Waiting for restrictions to lift. Waiting to resume the business of attracting visitors. Most destination marketing organizations went quiet on anything politically adjacent, stayed in their lane, and held their breath.
But BWM understood there was something more they could do to help their client, Finger Lakes Wine Country, do differently. With guidance from BWM, FLWC stepped into the community — not as a tourism brand, but as a neighbor.
THE BRIEF
This was not a campaign FLWC had ever done before, in a space they had never operated in, on a topic no regional tourism brand had publicly taken on. Vaccination messaging was politically charged, socially divisive, and entirely outside the traditional mandate of a destination marketing organization. There was no industry playbook to follow. Most organizations in the same position stayed silent.
BWM advised FLWC to lean in.
The recommendation came from something that can’t be replicated from an office removed from the community: ears on the ground. Our team understood what the Finger Lakes community was experiencing, what residents needed to hear, and — critically — that they would show up. Not as passive subjects of a campaign, but as willing, proud voices of it.
This was also not the first time BWM had navigated FLWC in this way. In 2020, at the height of the pandemic’s first wave, BWM had already guided the organization through the launch of #MaskUpFLX — a campaign encouraging locals and visitors to wear masks and practice social distancing. That campaign established FLWC as a community-first brand long before community-first became a marketing trend. #VaxUpFLX was its natural evolution.
WHAT BWM DID
We concepted, produced, and art directed the #VaxUpFLX campaign — a paid advertising initiative featuring real Finger Lakes residents sharing, in their own words, why getting vaccinated mattered to them. No actors. No scripted talking points. Community members — the same people who make this region what it is — speaking honestly about a public health decision that affected everyone around them.
The campaign ran across paid digital and social channels, produced in collaboration with local photographer Lee Speary, and was deployed through FLWC’s established audience at a moment when that audience was hungry for exactly this kind of grounded, trusted voice.
WHY IT MATTERED — AND WHY IT WAS UNPRECEDENTED
A thorough review of comparable organizations during this period — wine country DMOs, regional tourism boards, destination marketing associations — confirms what the Wine Industry Advisor documented in April 2021: Finger Lakes Wine Country was doing something no comparable organization was doing.
Sonoma County’s wine industry ran internal worker vaccination programs. New Jersey wine country participated in a state-mandated incentive promotion. Other wine regions stayed entirely silent on the topic. None launched a proactive, community-cast, paid advertising campaign on their own initiative — without a government mandate, without an industry directive, and in a moment when the subject was genuinely polarizing.
The trade press noticed. Wine Industry Advisor published a feature on the campaign, writing that FLWC was “stepping up to protect the community like no other tourism brand” and that “not many in the travel tourism space are as vocal about mask mandates and vaccinations on their social platforms.”
The campaign did something that can’t be measured in click-through rates: it kept FLWC relevant, trusted, and connected to its community at a moment when no one was traveling. It demonstrated that the brand stood for something beyond tourism — that it genuinely belonged to the people who lived there, not just the people passing through.
That kind of community trust doesn’t appear overnight. It’s built campaign by campaign, decision by decision, across years of knowing a place well enough to speak for it when it matters most.
THE STRATEGIC LESSON
BWM’s instinct to run #VaxUpFLX didn’t come from a marketing brief. It came from experience — in community work, in advocacy, in listening. BWM brought to FLWC something no agency without deep regional roots and community work experience could have offered: the confidence to act, the knowledge that the community would respond, and the creative capability to do it with integrity.
In a period when most tourism organizations were asking “when can we start marketing again?” — BWM helped FLWC ask a better question: “what does our community need from us right now?”
One additional note:
This campaign pre-dates the industry-wide conversation about DMOs as “community stewards” rather than pure marketing engines by nearly two years — a framework that MMGY Global, Destinations International, and others would eventually publish white papers on in 2022 and 2023. FLWC, guided by BWM, was already living that model in 2020 and 2021. That’s not a footnote. That’s a leadership position.
