The TRAVEL AGENCY
The Travel Agency
The Travel Agency is New York’s largest cannabis dispensary, and they want to make a massive impression on their audience. The NYC cannabis space is practically empty when it comes to advertising, with most dispensaries opting not to create a real brand at all. In this way, The Travel Agency is doing something singular — and they wanted to bring me on to help develop their brand personality and sense of humor.
CANNABIS CARRIER PIGEON CAMPAIGN
When The Travel Agency wanted to promote their delivery service, they called on a very small team to develop the creative concept: their in-house creative director and project manager, and me. We wanted to pull off a major stunt, making our audience believe we were going to launch “Cannabis Carrier Pigeons” to deliver weed.
The team wanted to go over the top, but I encouraged them to go authentic. In my view, this would be the way to get it to actually take off and not just feel like marketing. I suggested we seed it with the right NYC influencers, pretending like they’re spotting our pigeons for real. So, that’s exactly what we did.
What followed was a true hit. A mega viral campaign that we made on a mega scrappy budget. Publications, the local news, and more.
Get ready to spread your wings and fly through the saga that was Project Pigeon.
PHASE 1: THE LAUNCH
Based on my creative strategy, we launched with “What Is New York” — a super popular (2M followers) NYC-specific influencer who posts the most unbelievable content that can only happen in NYC. Cannabis carrier pigeons felt like a slam dunk for his page… and it was. Millions of impressions, 14K likes & nearly 10K shares. Engagement towards the top of any of his posts’ performance, all organic + earned.
We directed the content capture, casting talent, scouting locations and working with a real pigeon trainer to create the results you see here.
PHASE 1: THE LAUNCH (CONT.)
We continued the launch on The Travel Agency Instagram, where we had a carousel set and ready to go for traffic to the page. The carousel got nearly 4K likes and another 8K shares on IG, eclipsing the previous all-time most popular post by 40x.
The post also got 650K+ views on TikTok, with 100K+ likes and nearly 35K shares — surpassing any previous post by miles.
PHASE 2: THE CONTENT
To push our campaign out, we created video comedy content for social. I wrote scripts and concepts. We cast two “pigeon trainers,” one from within The Travel Agency, and one from a casting call I wrote and distributed. We ended up with a very funny content series that (appropriately) got over 420K organic views across TT + IG.
Click on the thumbnails below to watch the videos on TikTok.
PHASE 2.5: THE RESPONSE
The team agreed our campaign would be a success if just one outlet picked it up. To our delight, way more than just one outlet picked it up.
FOX5 New York put the story on their nightly broadcast, and the clip got 1.8M views on TikTok with 300K+ likes and nearly 140K shares.
And that’s just the beginning. The story got picked up in TimeOut New York, New York Post, The Brooklyn Eagle, Times Leader, and a small army of cannabis industry publications.
PHASE 3: THE REVEAL
From the onset, we knew we’d have to reveal the pigeons weren’t really happening. We took a social-first approach here, too, piggybacking on our own viral content with a viral faux-apology-style post. (Note: this was way ahead of this trend!)
WILD POSTINGS
Apart from Project Pigeon, I’ve helped cultivate The Travel Agency’s brand voice across materials. Here are a variety of wild posting lines I wrote, featured all around NYC.
