• Situation: Nearly 90% of Americans report feeling stressed by the trip planning process. In fact, it takes 45 stress-filled days to plan a vacation, and the abundance of content online (i.e., a Google search for “vacation ideas” nets 2.2 billion results) makes it feel even more daunting.

• Brief: The best person to listen to when planning a vacation is yourself — more precisely, your subconscious mind to help you plan the trip you really desire. Not only does it process 500,000 times faster than your conscious mind, it also never tells a lie, giving you the most authentic advice possible.

• Objectives: Using Tennessee’s music differentiator, make planning a vacation to Tennessee easier and more impactful.

The idea was to alleviate stress by letting people’s subconscious minds plan their next vacations for them. Not only is your subconscious about 500,000 times more efficient than your conscious mind, it’s also a direct reflection of who you are and what you truly like.

Since Tennessee is a destination known for its sounds, we built the experience around authentic Tennessee sounds. People listened to quick samples of different audio clips from popular Tennessee destinations in a soundproof booth to heighten their focus. Then, we tracked their brains’ subconscious responses. The more intrigue and joy a sound created in their brains, the stronger the recommendation.

Finally, an algorithm built personalized trip itineraries based solely on what sounds people’s brains loved the most, cutting out hours upon hours of planning and introducing people to new Tennessee experiences they never knew existed.

To collect brain wave data, we used a Muse 2 brain wave-sensing headset. Once the user was connected to the device, we used API calls to transfer the raw brain wave data into a Power Session Score. These scores were captured in a Firebase instance every second for the duration of a user’s time in our booth.

The conversion to the Power Session Score happened via the API, meaning we were not storing actual brain wave data of the user to avoid privacy issues. We did store the scores, which we then averaged across each sound clip. The aggregate score for each sound was passed to a web server that generated a unique URL for each user’s results page. There, people could see their own brain wave data and could get their top recommendations for where their brains would love to visit in Tennessee.

The entire experience centered around our Sound Advice traveling booths. They appeared across North America at festivals, college basketball tournaments, and downtowns in our target markets, and even went on tour with a band from Tennessee (NEEDTOBREATHE) for 10 shows in 10 unique markets. Every appearance was hand-selected to overlap with one of Tennessee’s primary target markets.

To extend our reach, both the headliner and opening act from our 10-show partnership promoted the Sound Advice booths over their social channels to their fans. At each appearance, we had wayfinding signage pointing people to the booth, videos teasing the experience and an exterior monitor on the booth that created intrigue.

The Sound Advice booth first appeared in June 2023. It also made appearances in October 2023 and March 2024. Now it’s back on tour in spring 2024.

The impact of using sound to drive interest in visiting Tennessee is evident, with 97% of participants expressing a strong intention to visit the state and explore the recommended locations on their itineraries.

Leveraging data based on consumers’ response to the audio clips enhanced the creative output, successfully engaged our audience and promoted interest in Tennessee tourism experiences. Users spent over 8 minutes engaging with their personalized results, doubling TripAdvisor's average browsing time, as indicated by Similarweb.

Users viewed their customized results 1.8 times, whereas they typically only visit our website 1.1 times. This indicates that Sound Advice garnered 64% more visits per user.